Meet the Brazilian who became a billionaire by creating Kalshi, a rival to Polymarket

Source: PortaldoBitcoin Original Title: Meet the Brazilian Who Became a Billionaire by Creating Kalshi, Polymarket’s Rival Original Link: The Brazilian Luana Lopes Lara, 29, has become the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. The rise of the Kalshi cofounder — a company that operates as a prediction market and is now valued at $11 billion — has attracted global attention.

A Computer Science graduate from MIT, Luana had an unusual path before entering the financial world. She studied ballet at the Bolshoi Theater School in Joinville (SC), where she faced grueling routines, with intense training and simultaneous academic competitions, winning gold and bronze medals in science olympiads.

After a brief career as a professional ballerina in Austria, she decided to switch to technology and moved to the United States.

In 2018, she and Lebanese Tarek Mansour — also an MIT graduate — founded Kalshi. The platform allows trading contracts on future events, such as election outcomes and sports games, with federal authorization to operate in all 50 US states, even where online betting is prohibited.

The company differentiates itself by claiming to offer “price discovery and risk management tools,” not regular betting.

Making this possible, however, was not easy. The founders faced years of regulatory battles before obtaining CFTC approval in 2020, which classified Kalshi as an event contracts market.

“We were diligent and worked with all the CFTC’s requirements. We didn’t give up until we crossed the finish line,” Luana said in an interview with Bloomberg in 2022 — a quote that shows the resilience needed to build the business.

After winning legal disputes, including a lawsuit against the CFTC itself in 2023, Kalshi saw its volume explode, surpassing $1 billion per week. The new investment round, worth $1 billion and led by Paradigm, Sequoia, and Andreessen Horowitz, brought the company’s value to $11 billion — and Luana’s net worth to $1.3 billion.

Today, while competing for market share with Polymarket and facing new pressures from state regulators, Kalshi continues to expand and integrate with major platforms like Robinhood, Webull, Google Finance, and even sports leagues, solidifying the young Brazilian’s name at the center of the global prediction market.