Luana Lopes Lara (born 1996) is a Brazilian entrepreneur who is as the chief operating officer (COO) of the online prediction market site Kalshi, which she co-founded with Tarek Mansour. She has a net worth of about $2.6 billion at the age of 29 in 2026, making her the youngest woman billionaire and joining the list of America's and Brazil's richest and youngest self-made women according to Forbes.
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Early life and education
Lara was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil on May 20, 1996. For eight years she attended a Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Joinville, before being engaged in a production of Swan Lake at the Salzburger Landestheater in Austria for a few months. According to Forbes, Lara won a gold medal in the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and bronze in the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad during her youth.
She attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which she graduated with a degree in computer science in 2018. While a student at MIT, Lara interned at Bridgewater Associates and Citadel Securities.
Career
In 2018, Lara founded Kalshi with Tarek Mansour, whom she met while the two were students at MIT. Following multiple rounds of venture capital funding led by Paradigm totaling more than $1 billion in volume in late 2025, Kalshi was valued at $11 billion.
In December 2025, Forbes reported that Lara became the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire at age 29, displacing previous titleholder Scale AI-cofounder Lucy Guo. Her net worth, estimated to be about $2.6 billion largely derives from her 12% stake in Kalshi.
In 2024, Kalshi received federal approval to offer contracts on U.S. presidential elections. It was the first time in more than a century that such trading had been legally permitted in the United States.