The 29-year-old founder of an online betting platform that correctly predicted Donald Trump’s election victory last year is now the world’s youngest-ever self-made female billionaire.
Luana Lopes Lara, a former ballerina and hedge fund intern from Brazil, reportedly surpassed the milestone on Tuesday after her fast-growing ‘prediction market’ firm Kalshi was valued by investors at roughly $11bn.
According to Forbes, the company recently closed a $1bn investment round led by venture capital giants Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, driving the value of Lopes Lara’s shares to $1.3 bn — at least on paper.
In doing so, she unseated 31-year-old AI entrepreneur Lucy Guo as the youngest-ever female billionaire, after Guo herself had overtaken Taylor Swift back in April.
“There are few better trainings for being told ‘no’ and pushing through anyway than being a professional ballerina — an injury or even a short rest could mean losing your spot,” Andreessen Horowitz partner Alex Immerman told Forbes.
“Luana learned persistence with grace early on… and she’s carried that same calm confidence into building Kalshi.”
Swift, now 35, reportedly reached that point in October 2023 at the age of 33, having famously begun re-recording her early albums in order to reclaim the rights from her old label.
Guo, meanwhile, founded Scale AI in 2016 and left in 2018 over disagreements with her co-founder, but retained a stake in the company — which received a huge boost when Facebook’s parent group Meta bought a 49 percent stake in June 2025.
Calculations of celebrities’ net worth are murky and sometimes inexact, in part due to the secrecy that often surrounds their assets. In 2019, Forbes awarded the title to then-21-year-old cosmetics mogul and Kardashian scion Kylie Jenner, only to rescind it the next year after accusing her of lying about her fortune (which Jenner denied).
In Lopes Lara’s case, both she and her co-founder, Tarek Mansour (also 29), are estimated to own about 12 percent of Kalshi’s shares. As the company grows, investors have paid more and more for those shares, making Laura’s and Mansour’s stake now worth a reported $1.3bn each.
Lopes Lara attended the prestigious Bolshoi Theatre School in Joinville, Brazil, where the daily schedule ran from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. and teachers reportedly held lit cigarettes under her thigh while she tried to keep it raised for as long as possible.
After performing as a ballerina in Austria for nine months, she quit to study computer science at MIT, where she met Mansour. As a student, she interned at New York City financial firms such as Citadel Securities (which played a starring role in the GameStop stock frenzy back in 2021).
“We saw that most trading happens when people have some view about the future, and then try to find a way to put that in the markets,” Lopes Lara told Forbes.
That was the spark for Kalshi, which lets users bet against each other on whether certain future events will come to pass. U.S. regulators consider it a financial trading platform rather than a gambling platform, which allows it to operate in states that ban online betting.
In 2019, the idea won Lopes Lara and Mansour a place at the Silicon Valley start-up accelerator Y Combinator, but it took years to secure the necessary regulatory approvals and actually launch a product.
The firm ultimately ended up suing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for the right to operate, finally winning its case and going live in September 2024 — just in time for the presidential election.
Kalshi users ended up betting around $3.6bn on that contest, and collectively called it right. The company now says more than $1bn is traded on its service every week.
