Entrepreneur and former Brazilian dancer Luana Lopes Lara
After the most recent round of investment, Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of the “prediction markets” startup Kalshi, now has a fortune estimated at 1.3 billion dollars. Surpasses Lucy Guo and Taylor Swift to become the youngest woman to build a billion-dollar fortune on her own.
The 29-year-old founder of an online betting platform that predicted correctly Donald Trump’s electoral victory last year is now the youngest woman ever to build a billion-dollar fortune on her own.
Luana Lopes Laraformer dancer and intern at a hedge fund in Brazil, he will have surpassed this milestone on Tuesday, after his “prediction markets” company was valued by investors at around 11 billion dollars — a little less than 9.5 billion euros.
According to , the company recently closed a round of financing for billion dollarsled by venture capital giants Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, which skyrocketed the value of Lopes Lara’s stake to $1.3 billion — at least in accounting terms.
With this valuation, Lopes Lara destronou Lucy Guoa 31-year-old businesswoman in the field of artificial intelligence, who until now held the title of youngest woman with a fortune of this size — after in April of this year having her own outdated Taylor Swift as the youngest “billionaire” ever.
“There are few better trainings than being a professional dancer to learn to hear ‘no’ and still insist. An injury or even a short period of rest could mean losing your place,” he told Forbes Alex Immermanpartner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Luana learned persistence with elegance early on…and carried that same calm confidence into building Kalshi.”
Taylor Swift, currently 35 years old, reached this level in October 2023, at 33 years old, after having started re-record your first albums for those held by his former publisher.
The holder of the title until now, Lucy Guo, founded in 2016. She left the company in 2018, due to differences with the co-founder, but maintained a stake in the company — which received a strong boost when Meta, owner of Facebook, purchased 49% of the capital in June 2025.
Celebrity net worth calculations are opaque and sometimes inaccurate, in part due to confidentiality that usually surrounds its assets, notes .
In 2019, Forbes awarded the title of youngest self-made billionaire ever to Kylie Jennerthen 21 years old, but backed down the following year, accusing the cosmetics entrepreneur and heiress of the Kardashian clan of having inflated the value of her fortune — something Jenner denied.
Lopes Lara, like the co-founder of Kalshi, Tarek Mansouralso 29 years old, will have around 12% of Kalshi shares. As the company grows, investors pay more and more for shares, meaning that each investor’s stake is now valued at around 1.3 billion of dollars.
Kalshi
Kalshi’s co-founders, Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour, met at MIT and strengthened their connection during an internship at Five Rings Capital, in New York.
Lopes Lara studied at the prestigious Bolshoi Theater School in Joinville, Brazil, where daily hours extended from 7am to 9pm and where teachers reportedly held lit cigarettes beneath her thigh as she tried to keep it raised for as long as possible.
After acting as dancer in Austria for nine monthsgave up his artistic career to study computer science at MITwhere he met Mansour.
As a student, he did internships at financial institutions in New Yorksuch as Citadel Securities, which played a central role in the euphoria surrounding GameStop shares in 2021, and Five Rings Capital.
“We realized that a large part of negotiation happens when people have a opinion about the future and try to find a way to translate it in the markets,” Lopes Lara told Forbes.
That was the spark that gave rise to Kalshia platform that allows users bet against each other about whether certain future events will materialize, in a similar way to , where an anonymous French bettor g.
North American regulators consider it a trading platform financial and not a gambling sitewhich allows Kalshi to operate in states that prohibit online betting.
In 2019, the idea guaranteed Lopes Lara and Mansour a place in the startup accelerator in Silicon Valley, but I had to wait years until Kalshi got all the required regulatory approvals and could effectively launch a product.
The company ended up suing the regulator North American, CFTC, to have the right to operate, and won the case, which allowed it to finally launch the platform, in September 2024 — just in time for the presidential elections.
Kalshi users bet around 3.6 billion dollars in this electoral dispute and, as a whole, got the result right. The company now claims that more than a billion dollars are transacted every week through its service.
As we wrote here a few days ago on ZAP, if we want to know who will win the presidential elections… .
