Luana Lopes Lara, a former ballerina and hedge fund intern from Brazil, reportedly surpassed the milestone on Tuesday after her fast-growing ‘prediction market’<\/a> firm Kalshi was valued by investors at roughly $11bn.<\/p>\n According to Forbes<\/a>, the company recently closed a $1bn investment round led by venture capital giants Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz<\/a>, driving the value of Lopes Lara’s shares to $1.3 bn \u2014 at least on paper.<\/p>\n In doing so, she unseated 31-year-old AI entrepreneur Lucy Guo<\/a> as the youngest-ever female billionaire, after Guo herself had overtaken Taylor Swift back in April.<\/p>\n “There are few better trainings for being told ‘no’ and pushing through anyway than being a professional ballerina \u2014 an injury or even a short rest could mean losing your spot,” Andreessen Horowitz partner Alex Immerman told Forbes.<\/p>\n “Luana learned persistence with grace early on\u2026 and she\u2019s carried that same calm confidence into building Kalshi.”<\/p>\n Swift, now 35, reportedly reached that point in October 2023 at the age of 33, having famously begun re-recording her early albums in order to reclaim the rights from her old label<\/a>.<\/p>\n Guo, meanwhile, founded Scale AI in 2016 and left in 2018 over disagreements with her co-founder, but retained a stake in the company \u2014 which received a huge boost when Facebook’s parent group Meta bought a 49 percent stake in June 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n Calculations of celebrities’ net worth are murky and sometimes inexact, in part due to the secrecy that often surrounds their assets. In 2019, Forbes awarded the title to then-21-year-old cosmetics mogul and Kardashian scion Kylie Jenner<\/a>, only to rescind it the next year<\/a> after accusing her of lying about her fortune (which Jenner denied<\/a>).<\/p>\n In Lopes Lara’s case, both she and her co-founder, Tarek Mansour (also 29), are estimated to own about 12 percent of Kalshi’s shares. As the company grows, investors have paid more and more for those shares, making Laura’s and Mansour’s stake now worth a reported $1.3bn each.<\/p>\n Lopes Lara attended the prestigious Bolshoi Theatre School in Joinville, Brazil, where the daily schedule ran from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. and teachers reportedly held lit cigarettes under her thigh while she tried to keep it raised for as long as possible.<\/p>\n![\"Kalshi](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/kalshi-luana-lopes-lara-and-tarek-mansour.jpeg\")
Kalshi co-founders Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour met at MIT and bonded further during an internship at Five Rings Capital in New York City (Kalshi)<\/p>\n![\"Video](\"https:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/img\/logo-white-out.svg\"){kind=logo}
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