Kalshi’s cofounder and chief operating officer Luana Lopes Lara went from training to be a professional ballerina in Brazil to becoming the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire with a reported net worth of $2.6 billion. But she said her new status hasn’t changed her life much: she still works 12 to 14 hour days and rarely takes a day off. The only difference now is she might splurge on a nicer meal.
“When I say it didn’t change my life much, it’s because I think that I’ve always been laser-focused” on building Kalshi, the 30-year-old Brazilian entrepreneur told Fortune Daily’s Ellie Austin. “Maybe I’ll get a fancier lunch once in a while because I want to eat nice.”
Otherwise, Lara said she doesn’t have the time to think about spending her money in bigger ways, though she’s used it to take her family to the Vatican for Christmas Mass and to pay for dinners out with her friends.
“For me it’s always been the company’s first, [it’s] the biggest priority,” she said.
Lara, who describes her family’s background as middle class, said becoming a billionaire felt “weird” and “surreal,” but characterizes the title along with Kalshi’s $22 billion valuation as “vanity metrics.”
“It doesn’t feel like it’s me in a way, but I think what it does do is that it is another indication of how all our hard work has paid off,” Lara said. “It’s just another data point.”
Kalshi’s valuation has soared along with the popularity of prediction markets, which allow users to trade on the outcomes of events like elections, football games, award shows, and Federal Reserve meetings by buying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ contracts. The company was valued at $2 billion last June, climbed to $11 billion by December, and doubled again to $22 billion in May after raising $1 billion from investors including Coatue, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. Last month, Reuters reported Kalshi was in talks to raise another $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation.
But Kalshi is also facing legal trouble in several states. States including New York, Massachusetts, Nevada and Michigan have sued, alleging its sports contracts amount to illegal gambling. New York is seeking $36 billion in penalties, more than Kalshi’s current valuation. In March, Arizona filed 20 criminal charges against Kalshi over alleged illegal gambling and election wagering, and Utah sued on Tuesday. Kalshi says it operates a federally regulated financial exchange, not a sportsbook, and its CEO and cofounder Tarek Mansour said the dispute could reach the Supreme Court.
“We don’t make money like a sportsbook,” Lara told Fortune Daily about the allegations. “I personally think it’s a good thing for people to be able to make money on what they know.”
She said prediction markets are “amazing” for society because they can forecast events better than any other metrics, citing Fed decisions and the weather as examples.
“We’re incentivizing people to be right and then we’re aggregating all of that research, all of that information into a single number that is in real time,” she said. “You just take out all the noise and you get a very good forecast of what’s going to happen.”
Kalshi began working with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2019 and received federal approval in 2020. Lopes Lara pointed to that process in rejecting allegations that Kalshi operates an illegal gambling business.
“If we wanted to skirt regulation, taking four years to work on getting regulated sounds like the stupidest decision,” Lara said.