Luana Lopes Lara

Luana Lopes Lara just became the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire, beating out Taylor Swift and Lucy Guo.

Luana is a former ballerina.

She trained at Bolshoi, where ballet teachers held lit cigarettes under her leg to test pain tolerance.

She performed Swan Lake in Austria after high school.

And then she hung up her pointe shoes and aimed for MIT.

Her dream? Become the next Steve Jobs.

She earned degrees in computer science and math.

Interned at Citadel, Bridgewater, and Five Rings.

But what she really wanted was to build something bigger: a platform where people could trade on the future.

In 2018, walking home from an NYC internship, she and her cofounder Tarek Mansour had an idea.

What if you could trade events (like elections, inflation, celebrity divorces) the same way you trade stocks?

They called their startup Kalshi.

Got into Y Combinator in 2019.

And hit a wall.

Prediction markets were stuck in legal gray zones.

40+ law firms turned them down.

They had no product and no revenue for 2 years.

But eventually, one lawyer said yes.

They fought for federal approval… and won CFTC approval in 2020.

And when regulators blocked them from launching U.S. election contracts in 2024?

Lopes Lara sued them. And won.

Kalshi became the first regulated platform in U.S. history to let people trade election outcomes legally.

It paid off.

In December 2025, Kalshi raised $1B from Paradigm, Sequoia, and a16z at an $11B valuation.

Lopes Lara owns 12%.

Her personal net worth? $1.3B.

At 29 years old.

Kalshi now sees $1B+ in weekly volume.

It’s integrated with Robinhood, StockX, Google Finance.

And more than 90% of trades are sports-related.