A FORMER ballerina has now danced her way past Kylie Jenner and Taylor Swift to become the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire at just 29.
Brazilian-born Luana Lopes Lara has snatched the crown from Scale AI’s Lucy Guo who herself took it from Swift in April.
Forbes confirmed she is now the youngest woman on Earth to verifiably make a billion on her own, knocking Kylie Jenner’s brief, later revoked 2019 claim further into the history books.
Her meteoric rise comes after her fintech prediction market Kalshi rocketed to an eye-watering $11 billion valuation.
Lara owns an estimated 12 per cent stake in the company, giving her a personal net worth of around $1.3 billion.
She co-founded the platform in 2017 with her MIT classmate Tarek Mansour, who also became a billionaire at 29.
Kalshi lets users bet on future events including elections, celebrity happenings and even sports fixtures.
Speaking to Forbes, she said: “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.”
The road to riches was paved with brutal regulatory battles and legal warfare with US financial watchdogs.
After years of pushback, Kalshi won federal approval to operate as a designated contract market and went on to win a landmark lawsuit in September 2024 over election-related trading.
The business exploded from a $2 billion valuation in June to $5 billion in October and hit $11 billion by December.
Crypto giant Paradigm led the colossal $1 billion funding round, with Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator piling in.
Ali Partovi, CEO of early investor Neo, said: “There’s a lot of other people wanting a piece of this business now that Kalshi has shown how big it is.”
Trading volume has surged eightfold since July, hitting $5.8 billion in November and outpacing rival Polymarket.
But Luana’s journey didn’t begin in tech – it began in a cutthroat ballet school where classmates allegedly hid glass in shoes.
Her teachers at the Bolshoi Theatre School in Joinville held lit cigarettes under her thigh to test how long she could keep her leg raised.
She says high school was “the most intense years of her life.”
Her academic life was just as fierce, winning gold at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and bronze at the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad.
After graduating in December, she spent nine months performing as a professional ballerina in Austria.
She then hung up her pointe shoes and moved to the US at 17 to study computer science at MIT.
During summers she worked at Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, Ken Griffin’s Citadel and Five Rings Capital.
Mansour, who grew up amid the 2007 Lebanon conflict, says she always sat in the front row at MIT lectures.
Their idea for Kalshi struck while walking home from their intern apartments in New York’s Financial District in 2018.
Lara said: “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.”
Approval wasn’t easy, with over 40 law firms refusing to touch the idea because the founders were “too young.”
Only one lawyer said yes, ex-CFTC insider Jeff Bandman, who guided them through the maze of federal regulation.
Kalshi finally won approval in 2020, while blockchain rival Polymarket was fined $1.4 million for operating unregistered markets.
In late 2023, Lara led the charge to sue the CFTC after it blocked Kalshi’s election markets on the grounds they resembled gambling.
Investors begged her not to do it, but she pushed ahead anyway.
In September 2024 the judge ruled in Kalshi’s favour, making the platform the first legal US election prediction market in over 100 years.
Kalshi users bet more than $500 million on the 2024 race and correctly predicted President Trump’s win.
“There are few better trainings for being told ‘no’ and pushing through anyway than being a professional ballerina,” said a16z partner Alex Immerman.
Since then, Kalshi’s trading volume has grown 1000 per cent, now surpassing $1 billion a week.
It has integrated with Robinhood, Webull, StockX, Google Finance and even the National Hockey League.
Donald Trump Jr. joined the advisory board in January after joining Polymarket’s in September.
Kalshi has now pushed into crypto, launching markets on Solana in December.
Despite sports markets causing legal clashes with US states, investors remain ultra-bullish about its future.
Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel said: “I don’t know that we have funded a company that has as much potential impact on the world as this one.”
With ballet scars, tech genius, courtroom victories and a billion-dollar brain, Luana Lopes Lara has officially pirouetted into global history.