29-Year-Old Becomes World’s Youngest Self-Made Female Billionaire

Step aside, Lucy Guo — a new billionaire has joined the ten-figure club.

Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopes Lara, 29, became the youngest self-made female billionaire on Tuesday after her startup announced a $1 billion funding round at an $11 billion valuation. Venture capital firm Paradigm led the raise, which also drew participation from Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

Kalshi is a platform that allows users to place bets on the outcomes of future events, like elections, interest rate changes and celebrity divorces. The site is legal and regulated in the United States.

“We saw that most trading happens when people have some view about the future,” Lopes Lara previously told Forbes.

Kalshi’s valuation has doubled in less than two months. The startup was previously worth $5 billion after raising $300 million in October.

Related: This Billionaire Says Life ‘Hasn’t Really Changed That Much’ After Making Billions. Here’s Where She Spends Money.

Lopes Lara’s 12% stake in Kalshi catapults her net worth to $1.3 billion, making her the youngest female billionaire who didn’t inherit her wealth but rather created it on her own, per Forbes. She takes the crown from previous titleholder Lucy Guo, the 31-year-old cofounder of Scale AI, and singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, 35, who briefly held the title earlier this year.

Who Is Luana Lopes Lara?

Lopes Lara graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018 with a Bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics, per her LinkedIn. She spent her college summers working for hedge fund Bridgewater Associates as a software engineer and Citadel Securities as a quantitative trader.

According to Forbes, Lopes Lara considers high school the “most intense years of her life.” She took academic courses from 7 a.m. to noon, and then ballet classes from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil.

The cutthroat program meant that she had to deal with classmates putting shards of glass in each other’s shoes to get ahead. She would study at night for academic competitions and won a gold medal at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze medal at the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad.

Related: This AI Startup Just Made Its 4 Co-Founders Billionaires — And They’re All Under 30

After her high school graduation, Lopes Lara worked as a professional ballerina in Austria for nine months before matriculating at MIT and starting her undergraduate studies.

At MIT, Lopes Lara met Tarek Mansour, a fellow computer science major who had worked as a quantitative trader and technologist at Goldman Sachs, Citadel and Palantir. The two started Kalshi together in 2018.

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Step aside, Lucy Guo — a new billionaire has joined the ten-figure club.

Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopes Lara, 29, became the youngest self-made female billionaire on Tuesday after her startup announced a $1 billion funding round at an $11 billion valuation. Venture capital firm Paradigm led the raise, which also drew participation from Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.