Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of prediction market Kalshi, became the youngest self-made female billionaire after her company announced a new $1 billion funding round on Tuesday.
The financing, led by cryptocurrency-focused venture capital firm Paradigm, values Kalshi at $11 billion and attracted participation from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator.
Lopes Lara, 29, surpassed former Scale AI winner Lucy Guo and pop icon Taylor Swift, who briefly held the honor earlier this year. Lopes Lara, who was born in Brazil and graduated from MIT in computer science, co-founded Kalshi in 2019 with Tarek Mansour, who is now on the billionaire list at the same age.
Still, the two Kalshi founders were beaten in the youth competition by Shayne Coplan, 27, founder of rival forecasting platform Polymarket, who in October became the youngest self-made billionaire. Coplan’s rise began after ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, invested $2 billion in Polymarket at an $8 billion valuation.
Kalshi allows users to trade based on the outcomes of real-world events, such as election results, interest rate changes and even celebrity divorces, through regulated, event-based contracts. The platform registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in November 2020, gaining formal regulatory status rare in prediction markets.
In contrast, Polymarket is a blockchain-based prediction market that uses the USDC stablecoin to allow users to bet on the outcome of events without traditional financial regulation. It is popular for its broad topicality and faster market response, but will have to overcome legal hurdles, including a settlement with the CFTC in 2022.
Both companies are reinventing how people process information and risk. What were once informal bar bets—who would win the Super Bowl or when inflation would cool down—are now multibillion-dollar businesses. In this new world, anyone with a strong point of view and some capital can bet on future events the same way traders bet on stocks or commodities.