Luana Lopes Lara’s rise from ballet studios to billionaire boardrooms is a story of sheer discipline, ambition, and innovation. Born in Brazil, she spent her formative years training as a professional ballerina at the prestigious Bolshoi Theatre School, where grueling schedules and intense competition taught her persistence and resilience from a young age. After a brief professional dance stint in Austria, she shifted gears to pursue academics — inspired by a math-teacher mother and engineer father — and excelled in science and math competitions before earning a place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she studied computer science and mathematics.

At MIT, she interned with top financial firms and met fellow student Tarek Mansour, with whom she would later cofound Kalshi, a regulated prediction-market platform that lets users trade on outcomes of future events like elections, sports and economic indicators. The startup navigated complex regulatory hurdles, securing approval from U.S. authorities and scaling rapidly. A recent $1 billion funding round pushed Kalshi’s valuation to about $11 billion, making both founders billionaires before age 30 and cementing Lara’s position as the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire with an estimated personal net worth near $1.3 billion.

Her journey — from dance to tech leadership — highlights a rare blend of artistic discipline, technical expertise, strategic insight and tenacity, redefining expectations for what young entrepreneurs can achieve on the global stage.