Luana Lopes Lara

Luana Lopes Lara is the co-founder and chief operating officer of Kalshi. She is a native of Joinville, in Santa Catarina, Brazil, trained as a professional ballerina, and studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She co-founded the company with her MIT classmate Tarek Mansour. Form D filings give 2018 as the year of incorporation, while Bora Investir gives January 2019 as the founding date.¹²³

Early life and ballet

Bora Investir, the B3 investor-education site, says she is a native of Joinville and was part of the "Escola do Teatro Bolshoi no Brasil."³ Olhar Digital places the school in Joinville: "Antes de ingressar no MIT, em 2014, Luana teve passagem pela Escola de Teatro Bolshoi em Joinville."⁴ On April 20, 2014 the Brazilian talk show De Frente Com Gabi aired an interview with her, described in its listing as a 17-year-old ballerina admitted to MIT's engineering program.⁵ Forbes's profile says she trained as a professional ballerina after high school and performed in a season of Swan Lake in Austria.⁶ Bora Investir says she became a professional dancer of the Salzburger Landestheater in Austria and performed in Swan Lake ("O Lago dos Cisnes") in mid-2014.³ Olhar Digital also says she worked as a professional dancer in Austria.⁴

MIT

Olhar Digital says she entered MIT in 2014 and graduated in computer science, and that she worked at Bridgewater and Citadel while still an undergraduate.⁴ Bora Investir describes a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science.³ Forbes's profile lists a bachelor's degree from MIT.⁶ In the fall 2024 lecture in course 18.642, Tarek Mansour said that Lopes Lara had guest-lectured the course the year before.⁷ Bloomberg Línea reports that she met Mansour at MIT as an undergraduate and that the two worked in an MIT artificial intelligence laboratory.⁸

Jobs before Kalshi

Forbes's profile gives her pre-Kalshi role as a quantitative trader at Citadel Securities.⁶ Inc. reports that her interest in prediction markets grew out of internships at quantitative trading firms, naming Bridgewater Associates, Five Rings Capital and Citadel Securities, and that these roles made her question her career path. She recalled asking herself, "When I’m 50, am I going to be happy?" and said the answer was no.⁹ Bora Investir lists Anheuser-Busch InBev among her employers, without roles or dates.³

Origin of the idea and the Y Combinator hackathon

Olhar Digital says the concept arose during the period in 2018 when both founders interned in New York, when they noticed that many financial decisions depended on forecasts about outside events.⁴ Bloomberg Línea describes the proposal as letting investors trade directly on the outcomes of events as a hedge, instead of through financial products that only approximated that exposure.⁸

The Y Combinator hackathon recap, dated October 8, 2018, lists "Kalshi" with the description "Opinion gathering platform" under "Three teams won office hours." The team members are Tarek Mansour, Luana Lopes Lara and Duncan Cock Foster.¹⁰ Y Combinator's company page lists her as a founder in the Winter 2019 batch (W19).¹¹ Mansour's March 20, 2025 post on X referred to the company's origin story and said he would share "how we met and Kalshi’s origin story."¹²

Public statements

Inc. quotes her: "The biggest dream of ours was having election markets legal in the U.S."⁹ Bloomberg Línea reports that in a 2022 Bloomberg News interview she said a company can reach the market faster on the unregulated path, and that on the regulated path there was only one way, which was to do everything right from the start.⁸

Political giving

Federal Election Commission itemized contributions under "Lopes Lara, Luana" and the variants "Lara, Luana Lopes," "Lopes-Lara, Luana" and "Lara, Luana Lopez" run from July 17, 2024 through July 6, 2026. ActBlue and WinRed conduit lines repeat candidate-committee lines, and NRSC transfers attributed to NRSC Victory repeat the NRSC Victory receipt. Counting each dollar once, the contributions total about 487,000 dollars: about 419,000 to Republican committees and candidates and about 68,000 to Democratic ones. Her occupation field reads engineer in 2024 and 2026 records, co-founder in June 2025 and chief operating officer in July 2026.¹³

• July 17, 2024: 291 dollars to Trump National Committee JFC and 261.90 dollars to Never Surrender, Inc., the committee that received the joint fundraising transfer.
• June 23, 2025: 5,000 dollars to Lummis for Wyoming (through WinRed).
• September 2, 2025: 7,000 dollars to Angie Craig for Minnesota (through ActBlue).
• March 3, 2026: 100,000 dollars to the Republican National Committee, in two records (55,700 dollars to its legal proceedings account and 44,300 dollars to its general account).
• March 30 to 31, 2026: 7,000 dollars each to the committees of Democrats Lori Trahan, Emily Randall, Andrea Salinas, Darren Soto and Vargas, and 5,000 dollars to Willamette Valley PAC.
• April 29, 2026: 250,000 dollars to NRSC Victory, a joint fundraising committee, which passed it to the National Republican Senatorial Committee the same day in three parts (132,900 dollars to its legal proceedings account, 72,800 dollars to its headquarters account and 44,300 dollars to its general account). Tarek Mansour's records show the identical 250,000 dollar contribution and split one day earlier, on April 28.
• May 19 to June 16, 2026: 3,500 to 7,000 dollars per record to about twenty candidate committees, Republican (Andy Harris, Scott DesJarlais, Mary Miller, Warren Davidson, Andy Ogles, Barry Moore, Ben Cline, Nick Begich, Brandon Gill, Mark Harris, Stutzman) and Democratic (Shomari Figures, Vindman, Mannion, Yvette Clarke).
• July 6, 2026: 16,500 dollars to the NRSC headquarters account, attributed to the Hyde-Smith Victory Committee, and 5,000 dollars to Conservatives Harvesting Success PAC.

The NRSC, NRSC Victory and Hyde-Smith amounts match Mansour's records dollar for dollar.¹³

Wealth

Bloomberg Línea reported in December 2025 that the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated her net worth at about 1.3 billion dollars, based on a stake of about 12 percent.⁸ Forbes's real-time profile, dated October 13, 2026, lists her net worth at 2.6 billion dollars.⁶ Forbes Australia wrote on May 12, 2026 that each co-founder was worth about 1.3 billion dollars after the December 2025 round at an 11 billion dollar valuation.¹ Forbes Australia reports that she became the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire in December 2025, ahead of Lucy Guo.¹

Board and officer roles

Form D filings for Kalshi Inc. list her as an executive officer and director, beginning with the filing signed March 19, 2020.² The October 2025 and August 2026 filings list her in the same roles.¹⁴¹⁵ Her FEC records list her as a co-founder in 2025 and as chief operating officer in July 2026.¹³

Foreign ties

Forbes's profile gives her citizenship as Brazil.⁶ On April 24, 2026, Brazil's National Monetary Council published Resolution No. 5.298, which bars derivatives tied to sporting, political, electoral, cultural or entertainment events. According to a law firm's summary, the websites of Kalshi and Polymarket were blocked in the country.¹⁶