Kalshi Co-Founder, 30, Is World's Youngest Self-Made Female Billionaire

Luana Lopes Lara, 30, is worth $2.6 billion, according to Forbes, making her the world's youngest self-made female billionaire. She claimed the title in December 2025, unseating pop star Taylor Swift and tech billionaire Lucy Guo.

Her fortune comes from Kalshi, the prediction market exchange she co-founded, which is now worth a reported $22 billion and growing. Kalshi lets users buy and sell yes-or-no contracts based on real-world future events — elections, economic data, weather and sports. The company describes itself on its site as "the first federally regulated exchange in the United States dedicated exclusively to trading on the outcomes of future events."

Lopes Lara's path to the top didn't start in finance. As a teenager, she studied ballet at the Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil. Competition there was cutthroat; she told a recent episode of the podcast Confession with Ali Partovi that students sometimes sabotaged each other by hiding glass fragments in each other's shoes. She attended technical school in the morning, then trained ballet from the afternoon into the night.

"Since I was very little, I wanted to do big things," Lopes Lara said.

What trap does she warn founders about?

On the podcast, Lopes Lara said many smart founders fall into a common trap when starting a business: they become "obsessed with probabilities."

"You can psych yourself out of doing anything," she said. "I think that going for it, taking the risk, believing that things will work out, is very important."

The problem compounds inside a company, she argued. If a startup's employees only think about the math of whether the company will work, the result is a "super negative culture that overreacts to every new information you have." Her fix is simple: "It's important to have a lot of optimistic people who want to build things in the company."

How did Kalshi start?

Lopes Lara created Kalshi in 2018 with co-founder Tarek Mansour. Both graduated that same year — she majored in computer science and mathematics, while Mansour majored in electrical engineering, computer science and mathematics. They met through shared classes at MIT. Lopes Lara always sat at the front of the room; Mansour wanted to learn from her example, so he started sitting next to her.

The business idea came during her internship at Five Rings, a New York trading firm. At the time, social media was buzzing with the narrative that reality TV star and entrepreneur Kylie Jenner was pregnant.

"I was like, 'I want to make a bet with you on this,'" Lopes Lara said in an interview with Bloomberg earlier this year. There was one problem: she had nowhere to place the bet.

That gap revealed an opportunity bigger than celebrity gossip. Lopes Lara found millions of people held firm views about the future but had no outlet for those beliefs. Kalshi was built to address exactly that need, and she's now working toward a future where people can essentially bet on anything.

Why does her story matter for founders?

Lopes Lara's arc — from Bolshoi ballet student to federally regulated exchange co-founder — turns on her core advice: don't let probability calculations kill the decision to act. As Kalshi pushes toward a $22 billion-plus valuation and courts a mass market of everyday bettors, her bet on optimism over odds is paying off at scale.