Luana Lopes Lara is a Brazilian-born entrepreneur, technologist, and co-founder of Kalshi, the U.S.-based, federally regulated event-exchange company that also allows users to buy or sell contracts based on the result of a real-world event.
Kalshi grew fast under her leadership and became a major name in the fintech world. Investors valued the company at billions of dollars, which made her the youngest self-made woman billionaire at twenty-nine.
Luana Lopes Lara Biography | |
|---|---|
| Real Name: | Luana Lopes Lara |
| Birth Date: | May 20, 1996 |
| Age: | 29 Years |
| Birth Place: | Joinville, Santa Catarina, Brazil |
| Parents: | – |
| Partner: | Tarek Mansour |
Early Life
Luana Lopes Lara was born on 20th May, 1996, and grew up in Brazil, where she learned the art of classical ballet in an elite school attached to the Bolshoi Theatre—an upbringing that was characterized by a very rigorous daily routine of discipline and performance standards that she has claimed to influence her work ethic.
Although she worked in Brazil, during her stay in the country, she also competed in academic events (especially in science and math contests) before transitioning into tertiary education. Her early years integrated artistic discipline and academic achievement and preconditioned her subsequent shift into technology and finance.
She subsequently immigrated to the United States, where she attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), graduating with undergraduate degrees in computer science and mathematics and receiving a Master of Engineering degree. Her MIT education gave her the technical background to the product and platform engineering of Kalshi and made her fluent in both systems design and quantitative modeling.
Luana Lopes Lara Career
In 2018, Luana Lopes Lara co-founded Kalshi with Tarek Mansour, having met at work in the field of finance and at MIT. The company was conceived through a basic insight: institutional and retail participants had no easy, regulated means of hedging and trading on real-world outcomes (e.g., economic data, weather, political results).
In 2021, after years of regulatory and legal work, Kalshi founders became federally regulated and introduced an event contracts platform, an arrival that is novel and controversial in American markets. The position of Lara was a combination of product, operations, and strategic leadership.
She contributed to initial product development, refined a market design, and maneuvered the complicated regulatory dialogue the company encountered in its effort to do business under U.S. derivatives jurisdiction.
During the leadership of the founders, Kalshi achieved leading venture capital support (such as Sequoia) and several funding rounds that facilitated product growth and liquidity affiliations. The combination of technical product work, regulatory strategy, and business development led the company to the progression from a startup to a multi-hundred-million-dollar raise.
The product offered by Kalshi was appealing to not only retail and institutional traders but also policymakers and regulators since the platform was touching election-related and politically sensitive markets.
Personal Life
Luana Lopes Lara has a very secretive personal life and does not disclose anything about her personal sphere. Nevertheless, her partner is publicly known to be her co-founder, Tarek Mansour, with whom she took Kalshi through its primitive prototype stage to become a federally regulated and multi-billion-dollar financial exchange.
The two became acquainted in academic and professional circles and have had a lifelong partnership, one at personal and professional levels. Authoritative sources verify that Lara and Mansour are a couple and co-founders, and they remain together as leaders of the company as the company grows. No other romantic history, prior relationships, or personal information is made public information, and she prefers to keep her personal life on the down-low.
Social Media
Luana Lopes Lara has a social platform profile and is a professional networker; her Instagram feed is @luana_lopes_lara and has more than 17K followers, and she shares selectively on product updates, talks, and travel. The content of her online activity is purposefully oriented to the business world and product information, not personal life elements.
Luana Lopes Lara Net Worth
As Forbes (2025) says, Luana Lopes Lara was the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world, estimated to have a personal net worth of around $1.3 billion. This value is on her equity stake in Kalshi. According to Forbes, Lara and her partner/co-founder, Tarek Mansour, own an estimated 12 percent of the company each.
After Kalshi raised 1 billion at a valuation of 11 billion, every one of their investments is now worth about 1.3 billion dollars, making Lara officially net worthy. This approximation is her estimate of equity value and is generally widely quoted as valid in financial reporting and in business reporting.