Luana Lopes Lara is the world’s new youngest self-made woman billionaire, according to Forbes. She now has a personal net worth of $1.3 billion. To achieve this feat, she usurped the throne previously occupied by Scale AI cofounder Lucy Guo, who, in turn, replaced Taylor Swift from the post in April. At 29, the ballerina-turned-company boss is the regulated exchange and prediction market firm Kalshi’s co-founder.
Guo previously clinched the billionaire status at 30. Meanwhile, pop star Taylor Swift snapped the title at age 33.
The company in question was worth $5 billion after raising $300 million in October. But having announced a Series E funding round of $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, which, in turn, has helped boost its co-founders Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour to billionaire status.
Who is Luana Lopes Lara?
The Kalshi co-founder, based in New York, has been tied the company for the past seven years (and counting). According to her LinkedIn profile, Lopes Lara got her Master of Engineering in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
During her time at the elite school, she built ‘Dance On,’ a website which allows choreographers and dancers to communicate and display staging formation, videos, announcement, questions and events for specific dance routines. Ahead of her MIT days, she even professionally took on the role of a ballerina in Austria for nine months. However, she ultimately let go of that post-high school part of herself, flying off to the USA to fulfill her MIT dreams.
The Brazilian native’s college summers were spent working for Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin’s Citadel, as per Forbes. Despite going all-out in her professional years, she still believes her time spent in high school accounted for the “most intense years of her life,” owing to her ballet career at Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil.
She was ultimately inspired by her “math teacher mother and electrical engineer father” to copiously study for academic competitions, which led her to clinching gold at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and bronze at the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad, as per Forbes.
How Kalshi co-founders connected
The same-aged Lopes Lara and Lebanon-born Tarek Mansour crossed paths at MIT. Having been members of the same friend circle of international students, they even pursued similar classes owing to their shared major in computer science.
The pair ultimately got close after Mansour decided to sit in the front row, which is where Lopes Lara always sat for lectures. Consequently, they both scored internships at Five Rings Capital in New York in 2018. And during a walk back to their intern apartment in Financial District, they both came up with the idea of a prediction market business, as per Forbes.
