Meet Luana Lopes Lara, the youngest self-made female billionaire
Luana Lopes Lara just became the world's youngest self-made female billionaire at 29, thanks to her startup Kalshi—a platform that lets people trade on real-world events.
Her net worth jumped to about $1.3 billion after Kalshi was valued at $11 billion, putting her ahead of previous record-holder Lucy Guo.
From ballet slippers to Wall Street and MIT
Lopes Lara started out as a professional ballerina in Brazil and Austria before switching gears to study computer science and math at MIT.
She later worked as a quantitative trader and met her future co-founder, Tarek Mansour, during internships in New York City.
Building Kalshi: Betting on real-life outcomes
Together, Lopes Lara and Mansour launched Kalshi despite early doubts from dozens of lawyers.
With some helpful advice from a former regulator, they secured approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2020.
By early 2021, Kalshi had raised $30 million from big-name investors like Charles Schwab and Sequoia Capital—Lopes Lara now owns about 12% of the company.