Luana Lopes Lara Becomes Youngest Self Made Female Billionaire

• Luana Lopes Lara founded the prediction-market startup Kalshi
• At 29 years old, she is reported to be the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire
• Kalshi was valued at around $11 billion, as of December 2025, after it raised $1 billion in a funding round

Luana Lopes Lara is one of the founders of Kalshi, an innovative start-up that allows people to forecast forthcoming occurrences in a novel manner. Kalshi experienced extraordinary growth since its inception and, in December 2025, achieved the status of billionaire in only three years.

The estimated valuation of Kalshi, as at December 2025, is $11 billion, following a successful $1 billion Series C funding round. As of December 2025, Luana owned approximately 12 percent of Kalshi and had an estimated net worth of approximately $1.3 billion.

Luana has an extensive background in classical ballet, having trained for many years at the prestigious Bolshoi Ballet School in Brazil and having spent long hours in class attending multiple subjects while also working on her dance training, resulting in a high level of resilience and discipline that influenced many aspects of her entrepreneurial success.

While interning in New York City during the summer of 2018, Luana and Tarek Mansour, another alumnus of MIT, conceived the concept of Kalshi.

The Kalshi platform enables people to trade on the outcomes of real-world events while providing a regulated legal avenue for this type of trading. Kalshi is thus creating a new category of financial instruments.

Such prediction markets are strictly regulated in the U.S., and most of these platforms work within a gray area. Kalshi did the opposite: getting properly licensed to operate, later called a DCM by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The CFTC also then halted election-based contracts from Kalshi in 2023, but Luana and Mansour won the challenge to that decision in court.

In September 2024, for the first time in over a century, regulated election-event trading was allowed in the U.S. when a federal judge ruled in favor of them. The regulatory success that was achieved at Kalshi helped to provide credibility and built confidence among investors for the business.

From ballet to billion-dollar success, Lara has the drive, versatility and ability to stay resilient through the changing landscape of entrepreneurship today.

She is a new breed of entrepreneur that can not only work within the framework of a complex and highly regulated industry, but who also has the ability to develop innovative solutions.

Her story epitomizes what it is to be a young female entrepreneur that is adaptable; however, there are many obstacles facing the prediction markets - ethical issues and regulatory issues remain as obstacles to full maturation of the prediction market opportunity.

Moving into the year 2025, Lara exemplifies what it is to be an entrepreneur with an audacious vision and successful outcome with a bold vision and successful entrepreneur.