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

Kalshi founder and CEO Luana Lopes Lara recently became the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world at the age of 29, with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion. His fortune came after Kalshi doubled his net worth to $11 billion in just two months, following a $1 billion Series E in December. Lara unoccupied Scale AI founder Lucy Guo, who held this title for about eight months, and now she sits atop one of the world’s fastest growing speculation markets, a long way 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 famous Russian institution. She went on to dance professionally for nine months at the Austrian theater, the Salzburger Landestatre, performing classics such as this one. Swan Lake. Her early experience as a ballerina helped convince Kalshi’s investors that she had the savvy and discipline needed to survive the cutthroat world of startups and financial regulations.

“There’s little better training for being told ‘no’ and moving on than being a professional ballerina,” Andreessen Horowitz partner Alex Immerman told Forbes in December, adding that Lara “learned to be graciously persistent early on … and has the same calm confidence in building Kalshi.”

After hanging up her pointe shoes, Lara moved to the US to study computer science at MIT, with the goal of becoming a technology entrepreneur. He worked at hedge funds in Bridgewater and Citadel, and met his future founder, Tarek Mansour, who shared the same hedge fund background and the conviction that prediction markets could become a major asset class in the world if brought into the light of regulation.

The couple founded Kalshi in 2018 with a simple yet controversial idea: that ordinary people should be able to trade the effects of real-world events, from currencies and interest rates to culture and politics. Against Silicon Valley’s go-fast-and-break-things motto, they spent years and millions of dollars pursuing full corporate accreditation instead of operating overseas, as many competitors did.

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

In 2020, Kalshi achieved a milestone when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission granted it designated contract market status, officially recognizing its products as event contracts instead of just betting. That opened up the opportunity for the company to list markets across the economy, politics and sports while always following the rules from the US.

“One of the reasons I think Kalshi ended up working is because we were so naive and stubborn,” Lara said on CNBC’s Changemakers and Power Players podcast last week. “We really don’t take feedback…When we get feedback from regulators…we just go back and do data analysis, legal research, all those things to prove we were right.”

Their persistence paid off in 2024, when Kalshi received legislative approval to offer event contracts for US elections—a practice that had been obsolete since the early 20th century. On March 2, the Associated Press announced that it would provide Kalshi with its vote-counting and race-calling data for national and major state elections, linking the platform directly to one of the most reliable sources of election data in the country.

Kalshi’s control win has not ended its legal head. States including Massachusetts, New York and Arizona have cracked down on the platform’s sports-related business, which accounts for 90 percent of its total volume, arguing that it amounts to an unauthorized sports book. For now, Kalshi’s state status offers protection from the country’s gaming laws, but the tension highlights how its business lives. The company insists that its markets are federally regulated products, not state-level gambling products.

Kalshi is growing in Lara’s homeland

Earlier this month, Kalshi announced its first international expansion through XP International, the global division of Brazilian currency XP Inc., which gives XP customers access to Kalshi markets through existing trading accounts. The issuance underpins Brazilian inflation and interest rate contracts, giving local investors a way to trade the effects of a macroeconomy that changes daily life in a country prone to long-term 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 with a very flexible risk tolerance and openness to innovation,” Shipman said. “Doing it right in the US is a huge market signal, so I’m not surprised they see an appetite elsewhere.”

Kalshi has also been growing its position in the US With a partnership announced this month with Cash App Pay, users can now fund accounts using the popular payments app, a nod to the platform’s growing audience. In February, e-commerce giant Tradeweb took a smaller 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 rose to more than $1 billion a week, according to the company, up nearly 1,000 percent from 2024. Monthly active users have risen from about 600,000 in early 2025 to about 5.1 million today, helped in part by splashy marketing like the AI-generated commercial that aired during the NBA Finals. By 2025, Kalshi has made $263.5 million in fees with approximately $23 billion in trading volume.

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