The original text is from Forbes
Translation｜Odaily Planet Daily Golem (@web 3_golem )
Luana Lopes Lara graduated from MIT with a degree in computer science. During her college summer breaks, she worked at Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin's Citadel Investment Group, and within just six years, she built a startup valued at $11 billion.
Aiming to be the "Ballet Girl" of Steve Jobs
However, this Brazilian girl still describes her high school years as the "most stressful years of her life." At the Moscow State Theatre School in Brazil, her ballet teacher would place a lit cigarette under her thigh, forcing her to stretch her leg to her ear—testing how long she could maintain that position without getting burned. To get ahead, classmates would hide glass shards in each other's shoes. Such brutal competition required her to attend academic classes from 7 AM to noon and ballet classes from 1 PM to 9 PM every day.
Lopes Lara was a professional ballet dancer at the Salzburg State Theatre in Austria, participating in a season of "Swan Lake."
The rigor and intensity of ballet training were just a small part of her grand ambitions: she aspired to be the next Steve Jobs. Influenced by her mother, a math teacher, and her father, an electrical engineer, Lopes Lara often stayed up late studying and participating in academic competitions, ultimately winning a gold medal in the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze medal in the Santa Catarina Math Olympiad. After graduating high school, she spent nine months as a professional ballet dancer in Austria before saying goodbye to her ballet shoes and heading to the United States to start a new journey.
29 Years Old, the Youngest Self-Made Woman Billionaire
Now, at 29, Lopes Lara has just become the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world, surpassing 31-year-old Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI, who held the title after taking it from Taylor Swift in April this year.
She co-founded the prediction market company Kalshi with another 29-year-old partner, Tarek Mansour, which announced on December 2 that it had secured $1 billion in funding, bringing the company's valuation to $11 billion. This round of funding was led by prominent crypto VC Paradigm, with other investors including Sequoia Capital, a16z, and Y Combinator.
The company allows users to bet on the outcomes of future events such as elections, sports events, and pop culture happenings. After raising $300 million in October, its valuation reached $5 billion, and after raising $185 million in June, it was valued at $2 billion. Kalshi's valuation skyrocketed more than fivefold in less than six months, making the net worth of the two young co-founders (each holding about 12% of the company) reach $1.3 billion.
Luana Lopes Lara (left) and Tarek Mansour (right).
"We are actually creating a whole new asset class, a brand new financial product," Mansour said. "We have legalized it and created a framework and industry for it."
"Now that Kalshi has demonstrated its massive scale, many people want a piece of the pie," said Ali Partovi, CEO of venture capital fund Neo, which was a seed investor in the company. According to the company, since July, Kalshi's nominal trading volume has increased eightfold, reaching $5.8 billion in November. Data from Dune Analytics shows that its main competitor, Polymarket, has seen its trading volume more than double since July, reaching $4.3 billion, while Polymarket's valuation has soared to $9 billion.
Kalshi's Early Days: Two Years on the "Edge of Life and Death"
Lopes Lara and Mansour both grew up in Lebanon and met at MIT. They were part of the same international student social circle, took similar courses, and both majored in computer science. Mansour experienced the 2007 conflict in Lebanon and self-taught English while preparing for the SAT. He recalls that Lopes Lara always sat in the front row of the classroom.
They became close after Mansour started sitting next to her to learn from her, and their bond deepened after both secured internships at Five Rings Capital in New York in 2018. One night, while walking back to their internship apartment in the financial district, the idea for a prediction market business suddenly emerged. "We realized that most trading happens when people have expectations about the future and are trying to find a way to translate that into market trades," Lopes Lara said. She added that traders and investors incorporate external events—such as the likelihood of election results or natural disasters—into their investment decisions.
They firmly believed there should be a way to trade the probability of events occurring directly, rather than indirectly through traditional financial markets, so they applied to the startup accelerator Y Combinator and were accepted in 2019.
However, the legality of prediction markets was unclear, and the two co-founders soon faced significant challenges. Y Combinator's honorary partner Michael Seibel recalls the early experience of working with them: "When they realized they needed federal approval to legally operate a prediction market, they contacted over 40 law firms for help, but none were willing to assist because the founders were too young and the company was too small."
"Just after graduating from college, we took on enormous risks. For two whole years, we had no product to show. If we didn't launch any product and couldn't get regulatory approval, the company would completely collapse," Lopes Lara recalled.
During the pandemic, Lopes Lara worked hard to grow the business from London, while Mansour was at home in Beirut. The deadly explosion at the Beirut port killed over 200 people, and Mansour was there at the time; he spent weeks helping to clean up the community and search for survivors during the day while working on Kalshi at night.
Battling with Regulators and Winning
In fact, they only needed one lawyer to succeed, Jeff Bandman, who had worked at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). He helped the founders complete the federal approval application and negotiated with regulators when they obstructed. In November 2020, Kalshi received CFTC approval to become a Designated Contract Market (DCM), with its prediction market classified as a derivative known as event contracts.
This approval allowed them to stand out in a competitive market. The blockchain-based Polymarket is not federally regulated and was fined $1.4 million by the CFTC for operating an unregistered market in 2022. The regulatory advantage allowed Kalshi to gain an edge during that time. (Note: Polymarket was approved to operate in the U.S. in September. Its founder, Shayne Coplan, is only 27 years old and became one of the youngest billionaires with a recent $2 billion investment from the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange.)
However, the regulatory battle did not end there. At the end of 2023, regulators rejected Kalshi's proposal to launch election predictions before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, citing that election predictions were akin to gambling. Lopes Lara proposed suing the CFTC at that time. "All the other investors in the company thought it was a terrible idea," Partovi recalled. But the two decided to go ahead.
In September 2024, a U.S. district court judge ruled in favor of Kalshi, making the company the first regulated election prediction market in the U.S. in over a century, creating history. "We sincerely hope everything is done by the book because our vision is to build the largest financial exchange in the world," Lopes Lara said. "Legality and compliance are principles we will never compromise on." In the lead-up to the election, Kalshi users bet over $500 million on candidates and accurately predicted President Trump's victory a month before election night. (Polymarket users bet a total of $3.6 billion in the presidential election.)
"There is nothing that builds your courage and perseverance in facing 'no' like being a professional ballet dancer; injuries or even a brief break can mean losing your position," said a16z partner Alex Immerman. "Lopes Lara learned the art of graceful persistence early on, and she brought that calm confidence to the creation of Kalshi."
Despite initial doubts about whether Kalshi could maintain its growth momentum after the presidential election, the company stated that its trading volume currently exceeds $1 billion per week, with over 90% of the volume coming from sports predictions. In January of this year, Donald Trump Jr. joined Kalshi's advisory board. (Donald Trump Jr. also joined its competitor Polymarket's advisory board in September last year.)
Kalshi has currently integrated with brokerages such as Robinhood and Webull, and has even brought in the hedge fund Susquehanna International Group to increase liquidity in its market. Recently, Kalshi has established partnerships with several companies, including the National Hockey League (NHL) and the online trading platform StockX, and is making significant inroads into the cryptocurrency space through integration with the blockchain platform Solana. The company stated that the newly acquired funds will be used to expand integrations with brokerages and establish new partnerships with news media.
However, Kalshi still faces regulatory pressure from various states, which have filed lawsuits against Kalshi's sports prediction market, arguing that these predictions should be regulated and taxed by the states. Given that the company has successfully overcome what once seemed like insurmountable regulatory hurdles, Kalshi's investors remain confident in the founders' ability to move forward. For Seibel, who has invested in thousands of companies throughout his career, this is just the beginning: "I don't know if we've ever invested in a company like Kalshi that has such a potentially huge impact on the world."
Related Articles
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
