From Ballerina to Billionaire: Kalshi Co-Founder Luana Lopes Lara Reinvents Prediction Markets

Kalshi co-founder and chief operating officer Luana Lopes Lara recently became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire at 29, with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion. Her fortune ballooned after Kalshi doubled its valuation to $11 billion within just two months, following a $1 billion Series E in December. Lara unseated Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo, who held the title for roughly eight months, and now sits atop one of the world’s fastest-growing prediction markets, a far cry from her first career as a professional ballerina.

Born in Brazil, Lara trained at the Bolshoi Theater School in Santa Catarina, the only satellite campus of the famed Russian institution. She went on to dance professionally for about nine months at the Austrian theater Salzburger Landestheater, performing classics like Swan Lake. Her early experience as a ballerina helped convince Kalshi investors that she has the grit and discipline needed to survive the bruising world of startups and financial regulation.

“There are few better trainings for being told ‘no’ and pushing through anyway than being a professional ballerina,” Andreessen Horowitz partner Alex Immerman told Forbes in December, adding that Lara “learned persistence with grace early on… and she’s carried that same calm confidence into building Kalshi.”

After hanging up her pointe shoes, Lara moved to the U.S. to study computer science at MIT, intent on becoming a tech entrepreneur. She interned at the hedge funds Bridgewater and Citadel, and met her future co-founder, Tarek Mansour, who shared a similar hedge fund background and the conviction that prediction markets could become a major global asset class if brought into the regulatory light.

The pair founded Kalshi in 2018 with a simple yet controversial idea: that ordinary people should be able to trade on the outcomes of real-world events, from inflation and interest rates to pop culture and politics. Going against Silicon Valley’s move-fast-and-break-things motto, they spent years and millions of dollars pursuing full federal approval rather than operating offshore, as many rivals did.

“Luana’s approach is not to be focused on scale at all costs, but responsible growth and profitable scale,” Emmett Shipman, fintech strategy and growth senior manager at risk management firm Wolf & Company, told Observer.

In 2020, Kalshi secured a key milestone when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission granted it designated contract market status, formally recognizing its products as event contracts rather than mere betting. That opened the door for the company to list markets across economics, politics and sports while staying within the guardrails of U.S. derivatives law.

“One of the reasons I think Kalshi ended up working out was because of how naive and stubborn we were,” Lara said on CNBC’s Changemakers and Power Players podcast last week. “We really just don’t take no for an answer…When we got feedback from regulators…we would just go back and do data analysis, legal research, all of those things to prove that we were right.”

Their persistence paid off in 2024, when Kalshi won judicial approval to offer event contracts on U.S. elections—a practice mostly dormant since the early 20th century. On March 2, the Associated Press announced it would supply Kalshi with its vote-count and race-call data for national and major state elections, effectively plugging the platform directly into one of the most trusted sources of election data in the country.

Kalshi’s regulatory wins have not ended its legal headaches. States including Massachusetts, New York and Arizona have scrutinized the platform’s sports-related trades, which make up 90 percent of its total volume, arguing that it resembles an unlicensed sportsbook. For now, Kalshi’s federal status offers a shield from state gaming laws, but the tension highlights how novel its business remains. The company insists its markets are federally regulated derivatives, not state-level gambling products.

Kalshi is expanding into Lara’s home country

Earlier this month, Kalshi announced its first international expansion through XP International, the global arm of Brazilian financial giant XP Inc., giving XP clients access to Kalshi’s markets through existing brokerage accounts. The rollout emphasizes contracts on Brazilian inflation and interest rates, offering local investors a way to trade macroeconomic outcomes that shape daily life in a country long familiar with volatility.

Brazil is a natural fit for Lara’s vision and background. The country endured decades of hyperinflation before stabilizing its economy in the mid-1990s. “That’s a market that has a much more expansive risk tolerance and openness to innovation,” Shipman said. “Doing it the right way in the U.S. is a massive market signal, so I’m not surprised they’re seeing appetite elsewhere.”

Kalshi has also been shoring up its position in the U.S. Through a partnership announced this month with Cash App Pay, users can now fund accounts using the popular payment app, a nod to the platform’s growing mainstream audience. In February, electronic trading giant Tradeweb took a minority stake and formed a strategic partnership to feed Kalshi’s data and analytics to institutional clients, a move that could make prediction markets part of hedge funds’ and asset managers’ toolkits.

Kalshi is growing fast. Trading volumes have surged to more than $1 billion per week, according to the company, up roughly 1,000 percent since 2024. Monthly active users rose from about 600,000 in early 2025 to around 5.1 million today, helped in part by splashy marketing such as a fully A.I.-generated commercial that aired during the NBA Finals. In 2025, Kalshi generated $263.5 million in fee revenue on nearly $23 billion in trading volume.

“We really think that prediction markets will be bigger than the stock market,” Lara said on CNBC last week.