Luana Lopes Lara Just Became The World’s Youngest Self-made Female Billionaire

On December 2, 2025, Forbes crowned 29-year-old Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder and CEO of Kalshi, the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. A clean 1.3 billion sitting in her name after Kalshi’s newest funding round pegged the company at 11 billion. And yes, she dethroned Scale AI’s Lucy Guo, who had dethroned Taylor Swift earlier this year. The throne is basically a revolving door, but Luana slammed it shut behind her.

Her path reads like a fever dream. She grew up in a small Brazilian town, daughter of a math teacher and an electrical engineer, then spent eight brutal years inside the Bolshoi Theatre School in Joinville. The stories are vicious: cigarettes under stretched legs, glass shards in pointe shoes, ten-hour rehearsals stacked on top of morning academics. She still led roles like the Black Swan and won science olympiads on the side, because of course she did. After a short professional stint in Austria, she pulled a hard pivot into tech, crossed continents, and carved her way through MIT with dual degrees in math and computer science.

The Market That Bet On Everything, Including Her

Kalshi started as a late-night idea between Luana and her future co-founder, Tarek Mansour. Picture two twenty-somethings walking around New York talking about the future like they could rewrite it. Then they actually did. They built a federally regulated prediction market where anyone can trade on real-world events: elections, the weather, sports, inflation, celebrity chaos. Not crypto-chaos gambling, but fully legal under the CFTC.

The fight to get regulated was gladiatorial. No law firm would touch them. They eventually secured approval in 2020. Then they sued the CFTC in 2023 over blocked election markets, and in 2024 they won, unlocking the first legal election trading in a century. Their growth since has been volcanic. Post-2024 election, volume jumped over 1,000 percent. One month alone hit 5.8 billion notional. They predicted Trump’s win of half a billion in contract bets. And by December 2025, the company quintupled its valuation in six months with a billion-dollar round led by Paradigm.

Luana and Tarek now sit on matching 1.3-billion-dollar net worths, the kind of situation that makes investors drool. But what actually sets her apart is the texture of her grit, ballet-trained pain tolerance, MIT-honed precision, immigrant discipline, and a holy refusal to look away from the hard thing.

Kalshi may be the hottest new asset class, but Luana herself is the real market shock: the kind of founder who doesn’t just predict the future, she strong-arms it into happening.