Kalshi Co-Founder Luana Lopes Lara Just Helped Raise $1 Billion
Embed from Getty Images Photo by Anna Webber/Getty Images for Inc. Luana Lopes Lara once trained at the Bolshoi ballet school, according to MoneyWeek. Today she’s co-founder and chief operating officer of Kalshi. On October 29, Kalshi announced a $1 billion Series G at a $40 billion post-money valuation. Wellington Management and Sequoia Capital co-led...
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Photo by Anna Webber/Getty Images for Inc.
Luana Lopes Lara once trained at the Bolshoi ballet school, according to MoneyWeek. Today she’s co-founder and chief operating officer of Kalshi. On October 29, Kalshi announced a $1 billion Series G at a $40 billion post-money valuation. Wellington Management and Sequoia Capital co-led the round, with Baillie Gifford and Andreessen Horowitz among the other investors, CNBC reported.
Kalshi was valued at $5 billion in October 2025 and $11 billion that December. It reached $22 billion in May 2026, when Coatue led a $1 billion Series F. The new round nearly doubles that figure in just over five months.
Building Kalshi From the Inside
Lopes Lara was born in Brazil in 1996, according to the South China Morning Post. She met Tarek Mansour while they were both studying at MIT, and the two launched Kalshi in 2018. The platform lets people trade contracts on real-world events such as elections, economic data and sports. Her Kalshi profile notes that before Kalshi, she worked at Bridgewater Associates, Citadel and Five Rings Capital.
Mansour serves as CEO and is usually the company’s public face, while Lopes Lara oversees much of the day-to-day operation, including engineering, investor relations and hiring, Bloomberg reported. In late 2023, after regulators rejected Kalshi’s contracts on the 2024 presidential election, she was the one who proposed suing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, according to VnExpress International. She told Fortune after becoming the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire that the work hasn’t slowed down: “I’m still here 12 hours a day.” Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index has estimated her net worth at $2.6 billion.
What the $1 Billion Is For
Kalshi plans to use the funding to grow beyond prediction markets, with plans that include stock perpetual futures, compute markets and a larger business serving institutional investors, CNBC reported. The New York Times reported that the Series G is widely expected to be Kalshi’s last private round before an initial public offering, though no IPO has been announced.
Lopes Lara has also pledged to overturn Brazil’s ban on prediction market platforms in her home country, according to SBC News.
The growth has come with legal pressure. On October 28, the day before the funding announcement, Utah Attorney General Derek Brown filed criminal charges against Kalshi and its co-founders, Mansour and Lopes Lara, accusing the company of promoting illegal gambling, FOX 11 Los Angeles reported. A Kalshi spokesperson told Reuters the charges were an “overreach” and said, “We look forward to putting a stop to this in court.”
At 30, Lopes Lara is co-founder of a company now valued at $40 billion.
