Key points
- Brazilian founder Luana Lopes Lara now leads global list of young women billionaires. She builds her wealth through Kalshi, a fast growing event market.
- She trained as a ballerina before switching to maths and computer science. That switch opened doors to MIT, Wall Street and major backers.
- Kalshi gains fresh buzz after huge trading during the 2024 US election. A new billion dollar raise sends Lara and her cofounder into billionaire ranks.
Brazilian entrepreneur Luana Lopes Lara has been crowned the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire at just 29, according to Forbes. Her rise pushes global stars such as Taylor Swift and tech founder Lucy Guo down the age ladder for female billionaires. The new title underlines how fast money is now flowing into fresh corners of tech and finance.
Lara is the cofounder of Kalshi, a United States based platform that lets people trade on clear yes or no questions about real life events. Users can buy and sell contracts on things like inflation reports, sports outcomes or election results. ValidUpdates has also tracked how stars build cash from bold bets, as seen in the BBNaija singer Whitemoney support story.
From ballet dreams to code
Lara’s story started far from trading screens and market charts. As a teenager in Brazil, she spent up to ten hours a day training as a ballerina. She later joined the famed Bolshoi Theater School and then danced in Austria as a young pro.
Life on stage did not last forever. Lara began to look beyond the studio and into classrooms. She won a place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied computer science and mathematics. She also picked up a master’s degree in engineering, with a focus on how people think and make choices.
Those years gave Lara the tools she would later use in finance. Coding skills helped her turn complex ideas into simple products. Her maths work trained her to think in clear numbers and hard risk.
Building Kalshi in the finance world
Before starting her own firm, Lara tried out life inside big money houses. She interned at Citadel Securities and Bridgewater Associates, two well known trading and hedge fund firms. Those stints showed her how major players handle risk and data every day.
In 2018, she teamed up with fellow MIT graduate Tarek Mansour to launch Kalshi. Their aim was simple. They wanted to let people trade directly on clear real world questions and not just on stocks or coins. Each market on Kalshi asks a tight question with a set date, such as whether inflation will hit a given number.
Kalshi is not just another casual betting site. It is the first fully regulated event contract exchange in the United States, with approval from the federal market watchdog CFTC. That green light gives it rare space in a field where many rivals face strict bans. It also helped the platform attract elite investors such as Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm.
Interest in Kalshi jumped again during the 2024 US election cycle. Traders rushed to price each twist in polls and policy. According to Forbes, that wave pushed trading on the platform into the billions of dollars. It echoed how creative work can carry huge legal and money stakes, much like the Drake copyright pool guns lawsuit.
Billionaire title and what it means
The real turning point came with Kalshi’s most recent fundraise. Forbes reports that the company pulled in about one billion dollars in fresh money. That deal set Kalshi’s value at around eleven billion dollars. With each founder said to hold roughly twelve percent of shares, both Lara and Mansour now sit firmly in the billionaire bracket.
Forbes notes that this makes Lara the youngest self-made woman billionaire on its radar. She replaces previous holders of that spot, including music icon Taylor Swift and tech founder Lucy Guo. Unlike many old money heirs, she built her wealth through study, code and tight risk work, not from a family fortune.
Her rise also shines a light on how broad the path to wealth has become for young women. Stars like Nigerian actress Regina Daniels and singer Ayra Starr often trend when fans talk about wealth and fame. Lara’s quiet route through maths, code and market rules shows a very different playbook.
Industry watchers say her story may inspire more young people, especially women, to take data and finance paths. It shows that skills honed in one strict craft, such as ballet, can later feed success in a very different field. For now, Lara and Kalshi face the hard task of keeping that growth strong while rules and politics around event trading keep shifting.
Whatever comes next, the new crown of youngest self-made woman billionaire now sits on the head of a former dancer who swapped the stage for screens and built a whole new way to trade on the news.
