GoKawiilNobody could have predicted this. In 2018, Luana Lopes Lara was an intern at a Wall Street trading firm when she noticed social media was convinced Kylie Jenner was pregnant. “I want to make a bet with you on this,” she told her fellow interns, according to Bloomberg, but she realized there was no way to actually place that bet anywhere. Lopes Lara couldn’t stop thinking about the gap she’d just discovered: millions of people had strong opinions about uncertain events, with nowhere to put their money on it.
Later that year, she co-founded Kalshi with her MIT classmate Tarek Mansour. Today, at 29, she’s the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world, worth $2.6 billion. Kalshi is valued at $22 billion after a Series F round led by Coatue more than doubled its valuation from December. The company has grown from 35 employees to 150 in a year and handled nearly $18 billion in trading volume last month, with sports bets making up roughly 80% of that activity.
But the company’s rapid growth hasn’t come without controversy. Prediction markets have faced accusations of insider trading industry-wide, and after a market tied to the fate of Iran’s Supreme Leader caused backlash earlier this year, Kalshi reimbursed $2.2 million in fees and losses to affected users. Lopes Lara still never got to make that bet on Kylie. But she built the platform for everyone else.