At just 29 years old, Brazilian Luana Lopes Lara has become the youngest self-made billionaire on the planet, with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion. She is not the youngest millionaire, but she is the one who has achieved it on her own merits, and not as fruit of an inheritance.
The rapid rise of her Kalshi betting platform has seen her co-founder surpass figures like Taylor Swift and the entrepreneur Lucy Guo in the ranking of the youngest millionaires in the world.
Younger and younger millionaires. According to ForbesLuana Lopes Lara is the youngest self-made billionaire in the world with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion. This fortune comes from his direct participation in the company he co-founded with Tarek Mansour, at a time when the valuation of the betting platform that rivals Polymarket has reached $11 billion.
In this new map of great female fortunes, Luana has displaced Lucy Guo30-year-old co-founder of Scale AI, who had previously taken the title from Taylor Swift who surpassed the billion barrier at the age of 34 thanks to her tour The Eras Tour.
Extreme discipline and turn towards technology. Luana Lopes Lara was born in the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil, into a family closely linked to science: her mother is a mathematics teacher and her father, an electrical engineer. Since she was little, she combined intensive study with classical dance, until she reached the prestigious Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil, where she combined academic studies with a strong discipline in dance. according to what he said People.
After finishing high school, she worked for nine months as a professional dancer in Austria before “hanging up her shoes” and betting on her other great passion: computing. She moved to the United States to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was able to do internships at financial firms such as Bridgewater Associates and Citadel, experiences that brought her closer to the world of markets and quantitative risk management. At MIT he met his current partner Tarek Mansour, also a computer science student.
Kalshi’s big bet. The idea for Kalshi began to take shape in 2018, when Luana and Tarek did a summer internship at the investor Five Rings Capital. There they began to give shape to their idea of creating a platform that allows operating directly on the probability of certain real-world events occurring, from elections and macroeconomic phenomena to sports results or pop culture topics.
Convinced that there was room for a regulated prediction market, they submitted their project to Y Combinator, Sam Altman’s accelerator, and were accepted in 2019.
As and how do they count On its website, in November 2020, Kalshi obtained the license from the Futures Trading Commission of US Commodities (CFTC) to operate as a Designated Contract Market (DCM), which allowed its products to be classified as event contracts and separated from unregulated betting, unlike competitors like Polymarketsanctioned with 1.4 million dollars for operating without federal registration. That regulatory difference gave Kalshi a strategic advantage over its main rival.
The figure of Luana: leadership, resilience and vision. Beyond the figures obtained by his startup, Lopes Lara’s story has become a story of personal resilience and young leadership in the technology and financial sector. His time in professional ballet, marked by extreme discipline and training that left no room for error.
“We saw that most stock trading occurs when people have a vision of the future and then try to find a way to translate it into the markets,” the millionaire businesswoman told Forbes. transform that bet on future events in a million-dollar business has been what has turned Lopes Lara into one of the new stars of Silicon Valley.
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Image | Flickr (Ronald Woan), Kalshi
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