Where did Luana Lopes Lara go to school? Career explored as Kalshi co-founder becomes world's youngest self-made woman billionaire

Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of the prediction market app Kalshi, has been announced as the youngest self-made woman billionaire. The 29-year-old alumna of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was a ballerina. She, along with her batchmate Tarek Mansour, founded Kalshi in 2017. Lara mentions that high school was an intense period in her life.

The prediction company had an $11 billion valuation recently. According to The U.S. Sun, she holds a 12% stake in Kalshi. In an interview with 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.”

Speaking of the early days following her graduation from MIT, Luana Lopes Lara said:

“Right out of college, we were taking on an insane amount of risk. It was two years without a single product - nothing launched - and if we didn't get regulated, the company would just go to zero.”

In terms of her career, Luana Lopes Lara was an undergraduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab for nine months between 2014 and 2015. She was also a teaching assistant at the MIT School of Engineering in 2016. Lara worked as a software engineer with Bridgewater Associates for three months. After holding a researcher position at CSAIL, she became a Quantitative Trader at Citadel Securities.

Neo CEO Ali Partovi shared a statement with Forbes, saying:

“There's a lot of other people wanting a piece of this business now that Kalshi has shown how big it is.”

Luana Lopes Lara talks about working with Citadel and the idea behind her company

Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour were panellists during a conversation with Molly O’Shea hosted by Citadel Securities. When Molly asked her to share the story about the company, Lara said:

“We started the company I think six years ago at this point. And we were both at MIT before, studying computer science and math, and we really never really thought about starting a company. It was always about finance. So fun fact, both of us actually interned at Citadel. I was at Citadel Securities. He was at Citadel, the hedge fund, and it was actually through a lot of these experiences in college that we actually learned about prediction markets.”

Luana Lopes Lara also said:

“And we started thinking that there really should be an exchange where you can trade directly on what's going to happen in the future. You're not trying to figure out, oh, so if this happens, that this, this, I don't know, this currency is going to go down, this stock is going to go up. If I do this, what our other variables I need to be keeping track of? We started thinking that there really should be an exchange where you can trade directly on what's going to happen in the future.”

Luana Lopes Lara explained that they wanted to build something that let people focus on the topics they cared about, which involved using prediction markets. Things eventually worked out, and they started the project because they were looking at it from a financial point of view.

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