Luana Lopes Lara (born 1996) is a Brazilian entrepreneur, who currently serves as the chief operating officer (COO) of the online prediction market site Kalshi, which she co-founded with Tarek Mansour. She had a net worth of about $1.3 billion at age 29 in 2026, making her the youngest woman billionaire.
Lara was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 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.
At age 18, she decided to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from where she graduated with a degree in computer science in 2018.
While a student at MIT, Lara interned at Bridgewater Associates and Citadel Securities.
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 networth, estimated to be about $1.3 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.