The Unprecedented Rise of the Brazilian Co-Founder of Kalshi, Now Valued at $11 Billion, Who Traded the Stage for Wall Street’s Regulated Tech
At just 29 years old, Brazilian entrepreneur Luana Lopes Lara has achieved a historic milestone in global business: she has become the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. The Kalshi co-founder earned the title after the company reached an impressive $11 billion valuation in December 2025.
🏆 A Historic Record: Surpassing Pop and Tech Icons
Luana’s meteoric rise places her ahead of globally recognized figures. With an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion, she surpassed Lucy Guo, the 31-year-old AI entrepreneur and co-founder of Scale AI, who briefly held the title.
Before Guo, the record belonged to none other than Taylor Swift. The singer, now 35, became a billionaire in October 2023 at age 33, boosted by her massively successful Eras Tour and her album re-recording project.
Luana’s success — along with that of her co-founder, Tarek Mansour, also 29 — is remarkable. She owns approximately 12% of Kalshi, and Tarek holds a similar percentage. Together, they control 24% of the company. This 12% stake translated into an individual net worth of $1.3 billion each (Source: Forbes).
🩰 Discipline Forged on Stage: From the Bolshoi School to MIT
Luana’s journey is rooted in exceptional discipline, formed in a world far from technology: ballet.
Born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, she later lived in Rio de Janeiro before moving to Joinville to study at the prestigious Bolshoi Theater School. The training was intense — combining ballet and academic study from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.
She recalls instructors holding lit cigarettes under her thigh to force her to keep her leg lifted longer. According to her Forbes interview, the competitive environment was so extreme that dancers sometimes hid shards of glass in one another’s shoes.
Inspired by her mother, a math teacher, Luana also excelled academically, winning a gold medal in the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze medal in the Santa Catarina Math Olympiad.
After a brief nine-month professional ballet career in Austria, she traded the stage for Cambridge, enrolling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to study Computer Science.
💡 The Birth of Kalshi: Betting, Regulation, and Risk
Luana met her future co-founder, Tarek Mansour, at MIT. The idea for Kalshi emerged in 2018 after internships at financial firms in New York, where they realized that “most trading happens when people have a view about the future and want a way to reflect it in the markets” (Source: Forbes).
Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour, co-founders of Kalshi.
Kalshi allows users to trade contracts tied to the probability of future events. Regulators classify the platform as a financial exchange, not a gambling service.
Legalization, however, was their biggest challenge. The founders contacted more than 40 law firms, only to be rejected repeatedly. Luana summarized the pressure:
“We had two years without a single product — nothing launched — and if we couldn’t get regulatory approval, the company would simply die.”
The turning point came with help from former CFTC official Jeff Bandman. Their boldest move, however, was Luana’s suggestion to sue the CFTC in late 2023 after the agency rejected their election contracts.
In September 2024, a federal judge ruled in Kalshi’s favor, paving the way for the first legal election contracts in the U.S. in more than a century.
📈 Growth After the Legal Victory
Kalshi’s regulatory win triggered explosive growth. According to the company, trading volume surged 1,000% year over year, surpassing $1 billion per week.
Platform users collectively wagered $3.6 billion on the presidential election alone — and accurately predicted the outcome. This success drove major partnerships with Robinhood, Google Finance, and even the National Hockey League (NHL).
⚖️ Predictive Market Duopoly: Kalshi vs. Polymarket (Dec/2025)
Kalshi and Polymarket now dominate the prediction market industry, but through contrasting models:
• Kalshi
- Valuation: $11 billion
- Status: Only fully CFTC-regulated prediction market in the U.S.
- Advantage: Regulatory compliance attracts institutional investors
• Polymarket
- Launched: March 2020
- Latest valuation: $12 billion
- Built on: Blockchain / decentralized architecture
- Strategy: Operates globally with fewer geographic restrictions, enabling massive notional volume
Kalshi recently expanded into blockchain as well, adopting the technology to compete directly with Polymarket, which is crypto-native.
🔮 Vision and Lessons: Building the World’s Largest Exchange
Luana’s story is a testament to resilience and long-term vision.
“We really wanted to do things the right way because our vision was to build the largest exchange in the world,” Luana told Forbes.
Her co-founder added:
“We’re literally creating a brand-new asset class — a completely new financial product. We legalized it and built the framework and the industry for it.”