From Ballet Dancer to the Youngest Female Billionaire: How She Built the Hundred Billion Empire Kalshi

Original Title: How Kalshi's Co-founder Went From Professional Ballerina To World's Youngest Self-Made Woman Billionaire

Original Author: Alicia Park, Forbes

Original Translation: 比推 BitpushNews

Kalshi is currently valued at $11 billion, making its two co-founders (Luana Lopes Lara, Tarek Mansour) both billionaires, with Luana Lopes Lara becoming the world's youngest self-made female billionaire as a result.

Luana graduated from MIT with a degree in Computer Science.

During her college years, her summer internships included working at Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin's Citadel Investment Group. In just six years, she built a startup valued at $11 billion.

However, this Brazilian entrepreneur still refers to her high school years as "the most stressful time of her life": at Brazil's Bolshoi Theatre School, a ballet teacher once placed a lit cigarette under her thigh as she stretched her leg towards her ear – this was to test how long she could hold the position without getting burned.

Luana attended the Bolshoi Theatre School in Brazil and performed in a professional ballet production of "Swan Lake" at the Salzburg State Theatre in Austria in 2014.

To gain an edge in competition, dancers would hide glass shards in each other's pointe shoes. In addition, this brutal training regimen included studying academics from 7:00 AM to noon, followed by ballet training from 1:00 PM to 9:00 PM.

The rigor and intensity of ballet training were just a small part of her larger ambitions: she wanted to be the next Steve Jobs.

Possibly inspired by her math teacher mother and electrical engineer father, Luana studied for academic competitions late into the night, winning a gold medal in the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze medal in the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad.

During the nine months following high school graduation (after graduating in December of that year), she performed as a professional ballet dancer in Austria, then hung up her ballet shoes to embark on her next journey in the United States.

Today, 29-year-old Luana has just become the youngest self-made female billionaire on Earth, surpassing 31-year-old Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo, who claimed the title from Taylor Swift in April.

She, along with fellow 29-year-old co-founder Tarek Mansour, entered the "Three Comma Club" (meaning a net worth exceeding one billion dollars) after their prediction market company raised $1 billion at a $11 billion valuation.

The round was led by the crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm, announced on Tuesday, with other investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Y Combinator, among others.

The company, which allows users to bet on the outcomes of future events such as elections, sports events, and pop culture events, saw its valuation reach $5 billion after a $300 million funding round in October last year, and $20 billion after a $185 million funding round in June last year. In less than six months, Kalshi's valuation has more than quintupled, elevating the net worth of the two young co-founders (each estimated to own about 12% of the company) to $1.3 billion each.

Luana Lopez Lara (left) and Tarek Mansour (right) founded Kalshi in 2018.

"Now that Kalshi has demonstrated how big this market is, there are a lot of other people who want a piece of it," said Ali Partovi, CEO of venture fund Neo, the company's seed investor.

According to the company, Kalshi's nominal trading volume has grown eightfold since July, reaching $5.8 billion in November.

Meanwhile, according to Dune Analytics, the trading volume of its main competitor Polymarket has more than doubled since July, reaching $4.3 billion, and its valuation has also soared to $9 billion.

Luana, who grew up in Lebanon, and Mansoor crossed paths at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they were part of the same international student circle, pursuing similar courses and majoring in computer science.

Having experienced the 2007 Lebanon Conflict and self-taught English while preparing for the SAT exam, Mansoor recalls that Luana always sat in the front row during class. After Mansoor started sitting next to her to learn from her, the two became acquainted and grew closer, particularly after both securing internships at New York City's Five Rings Capital in 2018.

One evening, as they walked back to their intern housing in the financial district, the idea for a prediction market business became clear to them.

"We saw that most trades happen when people have some view of the future and then try to find a way to put that into the market," Luana previously told Forbes. She added that traders and investors incorporate external events—such as election results or the likelihood of a natural disaster—into their investment decisions.

Based on the belief that "there should be a way to trade directly on the probability of events happening rather than indirectly through traditional financial markets," they applied to the startup accelerator Y Combinator and were admitted in 2019.

However, the legitimacy of prediction markets was still unclear, and the co-founders soon faced an uphill battle. Michael Seibel, a partner at Y Combinator, recalled the early days of working with the two: when they realized they needed federal approval to operate a prediction market legally, they reached out to over 40 law firms for help, but none were willing to assist because the founders were too young and the company was too small.

"Just out of college, we were taking on a huge risk. Two full years without any product—nothing launched—our company would go to zero if we did not get regulatory approval," Lopez Larraga reminisced. During the pandemic, she tried to establish the business in London, while Mansoor returned to Beirut. (He experienced the devastating port explosion in the city, which killed over 200 people. For weeks, he worked on Kalshi at night and helped clean up the community and search for survivors during the day.)

It ultimately took just one lawyer to say "yes" to them: Jeff Bandman, who had previously worked at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, helped the founders complete the application for federal approval and mediated with regulatory agencies when opposition was raised. In November 2020, Kalshi received approval from the CFTC, becoming a designated contract market, categorizing its prediction market as a derivative called an "event contract."

This approval also set them apart in the competitive landscape. Blockchain-based Polymarket was not federally regulated at the time and was fined $1.4 million by the CFTC in 2022 for operating an unregistered market.

All of this gave Kalshi a time advantage. (Polymarket was approved to launch in the U.S. in September of last year. Its founder, Shayne Coplan, at 27 years old, benefited from the recent $2 billion investment in the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, making him one of the youngest billionaires.)

However, the regulatory struggle did not end there. By the end of 2023, when regulatory bodies rejected Kalshi's election contracts slated for release before the 2024 U.S. presidential election citing "election contract-like gambling," it was Luana who came up with the idea to sue the CFTC. "All of the company's other investors said it was a terrible idea," Patovi recalled. But the two of them went ahead with it.

In September 2024, a U.S. District Court judge ruled in favor of Kalshi, making the company the first regulated election contract market in the U.S. in over a century, creating history.

"We really wanted to do things the right way because our vision is to build the world's largest financial trading platform," Luana said. "Operating legally is something we cannot compromise on."

During the preparation phase before the election, Kalshi's user count doubled, with over $500 million wagered by users on either Trump or Kamala Harris. Its users correctly predicted Trump's presidential victory a month before election night. (Polymarket users wagered a total of $3.6 billion on the presidential election.)

"There are few training grounds better than being a professional ballet dancer to teach you to persist gracefully when told 'no'—injury or even a temporary break could mean losing your spot," said a16z partner Alex Immerman. "Luana learned this early on… and she brought this poised confidence into the founding process of Kalshi."

Despite initial skepticism about its post-U.S. presidential election momentum, Kalshi has stated that its weekly trading volume now exceeds $1 billion, with over 90% of the volume being driven by sports event contracts. In January of this year, Donald Trump Jr. joined Kalshi's advisory board. (Don Jr. also joined the advisory board of its competitor Polymarket in September of last year.)

Kalshi has now integrated with brokers such as Robinhood and Webull, and has even brought on hedge fund Susquehanna International Group to add liquidity to its markets. Recently, Kalshi has partnered with entities ranging from the National Hockey League to online marketplace StockX, and has made a big leap into the crypto space through integration with blockchain platform Solana.

The company stated that the new funding will be used to expand integrations with brokers and establish new partnerships with news organizations.

However, it still faces regulatory pressure from some states, which have taken legal action against Kalshi's sports contracts, arguing that these contracts should be regulated and taxed at the state level. Despite this, considering the company has successfully navigated what once seemed like insurmountable regulatory hurdles, investors in Kalshi remain optimistic about the founder's ability to overcome challenges.

For Seibel, who has invested in thousands of companies throughout his career as a Y Combinator partner, this moment is just the beginning: "In my mind, we’ve never invested in a company that has the potential for such a huge impact on the world."

Original Article Link