Luana Lopez Lara, Kalshi’s co-founder and chief operating officer, recently became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the age of 29, with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion. Its fortune swelled after Calci doubled its value to $11 billion in just two months, following a $1 billion Series E in December. Lara Overthrown Lucy Gu, co-founder of Scale AI, Who has held the title for about eight months, and now Sitting atop one of the world’s fastest-growing prediction markets, she’s a far cry from her first career as a professional ballet dancer.
Lara was born in Brazil and trained at the Bolshoi Theater School in Santa Catarina, the only campus of the famous Russian institution. She continued to dance professionally for about nine months at the Austrian Salzburger Landestheater, performing classical productions such as Swan Lake. Her early experience as a ballerina helped convince Calci’s investors that she had the grit and discipline needed to survive in the world of startups and financial regulation.
“There are few better exercises for saying “no” and moving on anyway than being a professional ballet dancer.Andreessen Horowitz’s partner, Alex Imerman, told Forbes in December, adding that Lara “learned perseverance and agility early on… and she has carried that same quiet confidence into building Calci.”
After hanging up her boots, Lara moved to the United States to study computer science at MIT, determined to become a technology entrepreneur. She interned at hedge funds Bridgewater and Citadel, and met their future founder, Tariq Mansour, who had a similar background in hedge funds and the conviction that prediction markets could become a major global asset class if they were brought into the spotlight by regulators.
The duo founded Calci in 2018 with a simple but controversial idea: that ordinary people should be able to trade based on the outcomes of real-world events, from inflation and interest rates to popular culture and politics. In violation of Silicon Valley’s mantra of “move fast and break things,” they spent years and millions of dollars seeking full federal approval rather than working offshore, as many competitors have done.
“Luana’s approach is not focused on scale at all costs, but on responsible growth and profitable scale,” Emmett Shipman, director of fintech strategy and growth at risk management firm Wolf & Company, told Observer.
In 2020, Calci achieved a major milestone when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission granted it designated contract market status, officially recognizing its products as event contracts rather than simply betting. This opened the door for the company to list markets in the areas of economics, politics and sports while remaining within the barriers of the US Financial Derivatives Act.
“One of the reasons I think Kalshi finished working “It was because of how naive and stubborn we were,” Lara said on CNBC’s Changemakers and Power Players program last week. “We really don’t take no for an answer… When we got feedback from the regulators… we would go back and do the data analysis, the legal research, all this stuff to prove that we were right.”
Their persistence paid off in 2024, when Calci received judicial approval to tender contracts for US election events.It is a practice that has been mostly dormant since the early 1900s. On March 2, the Associated Press announced It will provide Kalshi with vote-counting and racial-calling data for national and major state elections, effectively connecting the platform directly to one of the most trusted sources of election data in the country.
Calci’s regulatory victories did not end its legal problems. States including Massachusetts, New York and Arizona have scrutinized sports-related transactions on the platform, which make up 90% of its total volume, arguing that it resembles an unlicensed sportsbook. For now, Calci’s federal status provides a shield from state gaming laws, but the tension highlights how new her business is. The company insists that its markets are federally regulated derivatives, not state gambling products.
Kalshi expands into Lara’s homeland
Earlier this month, Kalshi announced its first international expansion through XP International, the global arm of XP Inc. Brazilian financial giant, giving XP clients access to Kalshi’s markets through existing brokerage accounts. The issue focuses on contracts related to Brazilian inflation and interest rates, offering local investors a way to trade the macroeconomic outcomes that shape daily life in a country that has long known volatility.
Brazil is a natural fit for Lara’s vision and background. The country suffered from decades of hyperinflation before stabilizing its economy in the mid-1990s. “It’s a market that has a much greater risk tolerance and openness to innovation,” Shipman said. “Doing it the right way in the US is a huge signal to the market, so I’m not surprised they’re seeing appetite elsewhere.”
Kalshi is also strengthening its position in the US with a partnership announced this month with Cash App Pay, where users can now fund accounts using the popular payment app, a nod to the platform’s growing mainstream audience. In February, e-commerce giant Tradeweb acquired a minority stake It has formed a strategic partnership to feed Calchi data and analytics to institutional clients, a move that could make prediction markets part of the tool sets of hedge funds and asset managers.
Kalshi grows quickly. Trading volumes rose to more than $1 billion weekly, according to the company. An increase of almost 1000 percent Since 2024. The number of monthly active users has risen from about 600,000 in early 2025 to about 5.1 million today, fueled in part by great marketing like A commercial created entirely by artificial intelligence Which aired during the NBA Finals. In 2025, Calci generated $263.5 million in fee revenue on approximately $23 billion in trading volume.
“We really believe that prediction markets are going to be bigger than the stock market,” Lara said on CNBC last week.
