<\/p>\n
Nobody could have predicted this. In 2018, Luana Lopes Lara<\/a> was an intern at a Wall Street trading firm when she noticed social media was convinced Kylie Jenner<\/a> was pregnant. \u201cI want to make a bet with you on this,\u201d she told her fellow interns, according to Bloomberg<\/a>, but she realized there was no way to actually place that bet anywhere. Lopes Lara couldn\u2019t stop thinking about the gap she\u2019d just discovered: millions of people had strong opinions about uncertain events, with nowhere to put their money on it.<\/p>\n Later that year, she co-founded Kalshi with her MIT classmate Tarek Mansour. Today, at 29, she\u2019s the youngest self-made female billionaire<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n But the company\u2019s rapid growth hasn\u2019t come without controversy. Prediction markets<\/a> have faced accusations of insider trading<\/a> industry-wide, and after a market tied to the fate of Iran\u2019s 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\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Nobody could have predicted this. In 2018, Luana Lopes Lara<\/a> was an intern at a Wall Street trading firm when she noticed social media was convinced Kylie Jenner<\/a> was pregnant. \u201cI want to make a bet with you on this,\u201d she told her fellow interns, according to Bloomberg<\/a>, but she realized there was no way to actually place that bet anywhere. Lopes Lara couldn\u2019t stop thinking about the gap she\u2019d just discovered: millions of people had strong opinions about uncertain events, with nowhere to put their money on it.<\/p>\n Later that year, she co-founded Kalshi with her MIT classmate Tarek Mansour. Today, at 29, she\u2019s the youngest self-made female billionaire<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n But the company\u2019s rapid growth hasn\u2019t come without controversy. Prediction markets<\/a> have faced accusations of insider trading<\/a> industry-wide, and after a market tied to the fate of Iran\u2019s 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\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.entrepreneur.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nobody 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. \u201cI want to make a bet with you on this,\u201d she told her fellow interns, according to Bloomberg, but she realized there was no way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2460289,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25177],"tags":[331083,390563,385265,22789,483920,483921,441305,390574,419268,372266],"class_list":["post-2460288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities","tag-billionaires","tag-entrepreneurs","tag-kalshi","tag-kylie-jenner","tag-luana-lopes-lara","tag-news-and-trends","tag-polymarket","tag-prediction-markets","tag-valuation","tag-wall-street"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/How-Kalshi-Co-Founder-Luana-Lopes-Built-a-22-Billion-Business.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2460288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2460288"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2460288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2460290,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2460288\/revisions\/2460290"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2460289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2460288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2460288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2460288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}