Ex-ballerina founds online betting exchange – and becomes youngest self-made billionaire in the world
Luana Lopes Lara has made her mark in the tech industry. The 29-year-old founder is the youngest self-made billionaire in the world.
Luana Lopes Lara is the youngest self-made billionaire in the world, according to Forbes. She and her co-founder Tarek Mansour each hold around twelve percent of their company Kalshi, which is worth around 9.5 billion euros. Your share therefore amounts to around 1.14 billion euros.
Your company Kalshi sees itself as a regulated prediction market where users can bet on whether future events will occur or not. These events range, for example, from interest rate cuts and political decisions to weather indicators. Exciting fact: The world’s youngest billionaire, Shayne Coplan, is also the founder of a prediction market.
Incidentally, Luana Lopes Lara’s career did not begin in the tech environment, but on the ballet stage. The 29-year-old once danced as a ballerina in the Austrian State Theater in Salzburg. After her time as a dancer, the Brazilian decided to study computer science at MIT. There she also met her future co-founder.
Billionaire needed patience when starting her business
The Kalshi platform works like a marketplace for expectations, where supply and demand not only reflect sentiments, but also bundle information. The US regulator CFTC views such markets as financial instruments that can hedge risks, for example when companies want to protect their planning against political or economic uncertainties.
The journey there was long because Kalshi wanted to be officially registered as an event contract exchange. However, this license category had hardly been defined in the USA until then, which is why the approval process took more than two years. The CFTC examined not only technical standards, but also market integrity, transparency obligations and the handling of manipulation risks. It wasn’t until 2022 that Kalshi received final approval, allowing them to roll out their model on a larger scale.
Incidentally, this approach would currently hardly be possible in Europe because prediction markets are classified as gambling in many countries. In Germany, according to the current legal situation, the model falls under gambling law, which effectively makes commercial platforms of this type impossible. The stricter regulations mean that the market has almost completely relocated to the USA.
