Sunday, December 14, 2025

29-12 months-Previous Turns into World’s Youngest Self-Made Feminine Billionaire


Key Takeaways

  • Luana Lopes Lara is the cofounder of Kalshi, a platform that enables customers to put bets on the outcomes of future occasions.
  • After a $1 billion funding spherical earlier this week, Kalshi is now valued at $11 billion.
  • Lopes Lara’s 12% stake in Kalshi brings her internet price to $1.3 billion, making her the world’s youngest self-made feminine billionaire.

Step apart, Lucy Guo — a brand new billionaire has joined the ten-figure membership.

Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopes Lara, 29, turned the youngest self-made feminine billionaire on Tuesday after her startup introduced a $1 billion funding spherical at an $11 billion valuation. Enterprise capital agency Paradigm led the increase, which additionally drew participation from Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

Kalshi is a platform that enables customers to put bets on the outcomes of future occasions, like elections, rate of interest adjustments and superstar divorces. The location is authorized and controlled in the US.

“We noticed that almost all buying and selling occurs when individuals have some view in regards to the future,” Lopes Lara beforehand advised Forbes.

Kalshi co-founders Luana Lopes Lara (left) and Tarek Mansour (proper). Credit score: Kalshi

Kalshi’s valuation has doubled in lower than two months. The startup was beforehand price $5 billion after elevating $300 million in October.

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Lopes Lara’s 12% stake in Kalshi catapults her internet price to $1.3 billion, making her the youngest feminine billionaire who didn’t inherit her wealth however moderately created it on her personal, per Forbes. She takes the crown from earlier titleholder Lucy Guo, the 31-year-old cofounder of Scale AI, and singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, 35, who briefly held the title earlier this 12 months.

Who Is Luana Lopes Lara?

Lopes Lara graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how in 2018 with a Bachelor’s diploma in pc science and arithmetic, per her LinkedIn. She spent her school summers working for hedge fund Bridgewater Associates as a software program engineer and Citadel Securities as a quantitative dealer.

In accordance with Forbes, Lopes Lara considers highschool the “most intense years of her life.” She took tutorial programs from 7 a.m. to midday, after which ballet courses from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. on the Bolshoi Theater Faculty in Brazil.

The cutthroat program meant that she needed to take care of classmates placing shards of glass in one another’s sneakers to get forward. She would research at evening for educational competitions and received a gold medal on the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze medal on the Santa Catarina Arithmetic Olympiad.

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After her highschool commencement, Lopes Lara labored as knowledgeable ballerina in Austria for 9 months earlier than matriculating at MIT and beginning her undergraduate research.

At MIT, Lopes Lara met Tarek Mansour, a fellow pc science main who had labored as a quantitative dealer and technologist at Goldman Sachs, Citadel and Palantir. The 2 began Kalshi collectively in 2018.

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Key Takeaways

  • Luana Lopes Lara is the cofounder of Kalshi, a platform that enables customers to put bets on the outcomes of future occasions.
  • After a $1 billion funding spherical earlier this week, Kalshi is now valued at $11 billion.
  • Lopes Lara’s 12% stake in Kalshi brings her internet price to $1.3 billion, making her the world’s youngest self-made feminine billionaire.

Step apart, Lucy Guo — a brand new billionaire has joined the ten-figure membership.

Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopes Lara, 29, turned the youngest self-made feminine billionaire on Tuesday after her startup introduced a $1 billion funding spherical at an $11 billion valuation. Enterprise capital agency Paradigm led the increase, which additionally drew participation from Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

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