A 29-year-old former ballerina from Brazil has become the world's youngest-ever self-made female billionaire, surpassing music icon Taylor Swift and AI entrepreneur Lucy Guo. Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of the online prediction market platform Kalshi, saw her net worth soar to an estimated $1.3 billion following a massive new investment round.
From Ballet Barre to Billion-Dollar Bets
Lopes Lara's journey to the upper echelons of wealth is unconventional. She trained at the prestigious Bolshoi Theatre School in Joinville, Brazil, where her discipline was forged in a gruelling daily schedule from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. After a brief professional ballet career in Austria, she pivoted to computer science, studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was there she met her future business partner, Tarek Mansour.
The pair bonded further during an internship at Five Rings Capital in New York. Lopes Lara also completed a stint at Citadel Securities, the firm famously involved in the 2021 GameStop trading frenzy. "We saw that most trading happens when people have some view about the future, and then try to find a way to put that in the markets," Lopes Lara told Forbes. This insight became the foundation for Kalshi, a platform that lets users bet on the outcome of future events.
The $11bn Valuation and Regulatory Battle
Lopes Lara reportedly achieved her billionaire status on Tuesday, 5 December 2025, after her company closed a $1 billion investment round led by venture capital titans Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. This funding round valued Kalshi at approximately $11 billion. Both Lopes Lara and Mansour, also 29, are estimated to own about 12% of the company's shares, making each stake worth $1.3 billion.
Alex Immerman, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, highlighted Lopes Lara's ballet background as key to her resilience. "There are few better trainings for being told 'no' and pushing through anyway than being a professional ballerina," he said. The path to launch was not easy. After winning a place at the Y Combinator accelerator in 2019, Kalshi spent years battling regulators. The firm even sued the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for the right to operate, finally winning its case and launching in September 2024.
Overtaking Giants in the Wealth Rankings
With this valuation, Lopes Lara unseats 31-year-old Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo as the youngest self-made female billionaire. Guo herself had overtaken Taylor Swift in April 2025. Swift, now 35, reportedly first reached billionaire status in October 2023 at age 33. Forbes notes that such calculations can be murky, famously awarding and then rescinding the title from Kylie Jenner in 2019 and 2020 over questions about her wealth.
Kalshi's timing proved impeccable. Its launch just before the 2024 US presidential election allowed users to bet a staggering $3.6 billion on the contest. The platform, which US regulators classify as a financial trading platform rather than a gambling site, now sees over $1 billion traded weekly. Lopes Lara's calm confidence, honed in the ballet studio, has clearly paid off in the high-stakes world of fintech.
