Luana Lopes Lara is a Brazilian entrepreneur, mathematician, and co-founder of Kalshi, the first federally regulated prediction market platform in the United States. Her journey from professional ballet dancer to financial technology founder led her to become the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire at age 29.
Key Highlights
| Detail | Information |
| Age (as of Dec 2025) | 29 |
| Nationality | Brazilian |
| Current Title | Co-founder and CEO of Kalshi |
| Estimated Net Worth | Approximately $1.3 billion (based on a 12% stake in Kalshi) |
| Kalshi Valuation (Dec 2025) | $11 billion (following a $1 billion Series E funding round) |
Early Life, Education, and Discipline
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Origin: Born in Brazil, where she lived in several cities during her childhood.
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Family Influence: Her mother was a math teacher and her father was an electrical engineer, which inspired her analytical aptitude.
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Ballet Career: As a teenager, she trained rigorously as a ballerina at the Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil, attending academic classes in the morning and performing intense ballet training for up to 10 hours a day.
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Professional Dancer: After high school, she worked as a professional ballerina for nine months, performing in Austria.
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Academic Excellence: Despite the demanding training schedule, she was an academic high achiever, winning a Gold medal at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a Bronze medal at the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad.
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Higher Education: Luana Lopes Lara moved to the U.S. to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), earning degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics, including a Master of Engineering with research in cognitive science.
Professional Career
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Internships: She gained experience in the quantitative finance sector by interning at top firms, including Bridgewater Associates, Citadel Securities, and Five Rings Capital.
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Founding Kalshi: She met her co-founder, Tarek Mansour (also an MIT graduate), during their time at MIT and later their internship at Five Rings Capital in New York. They launched Kalshi in 2018.
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Core Vision: The idea for Kalshi was to create a regulated platform allowing users to trade on the outcome of real-world events (event contracts), turning uncertainty into an investable asset class.
The Kalshi Regulatory Battle
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Regulatory Milestone: Kalshi spent two years navigating the legal landscape and secured a landmark victory by becoming the first fully regulated event-contract exchange in the U.S., designated a Contract Market (DCM) by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in 2020.
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Legal Win: In 2023, the CFTC blocked Kalshi’s election-based contracts. Lopes Lara and Mansour sued the regulator and won in September 2024, allowing the first regulated U.S. election trading in over a century.
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Current Metrics (Dec 2025):
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The company’s valuation soared from $2 billion in June to $11 billion following a $1 billion Series E funding round.
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Weekly trading volumes now exceed $1 billion, marking a surge of over 1,000% compared to 2024.
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The platform now offers over 3,500 markets each week.
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Key Integrations & Partnerships: Kalshi has rapidly expanded by integrating with brokerages like Robinhood and Webull, securing liquidity from hedge fund Susquehanna International Group, and forming partnerships with organizations like the National Hockey League (NHL) and StockX.
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Media Partnerships (2025): Kalshi recently entered into major partnerships with news networks CNN and CNBC to integrate its real-time prediction market data into their newsroom and financial coverage starting in 2026.
Lopes Lara’s success is attributed to her resilience and discipline, honed from years of ballet, and her strong vision to legalize and build the world’s biggest financial exchange for event contracts.
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