Lopes Lara, formerly of market maker Citadel Securities, and Mansour, who worked at hedge fund Citadel, co-founded Kalshi in 2018. In just six years, the company has raised $1 billion and reached a valuation exceeding $11 billion.
The pair first connected as interns at Five Rings Capital in New York that same year. Spending evenings together after work, they developed the idea for a prediction-market platform.
During their time in Manhattan, they noticed that many financial decisions hinged on expectations about future events — yet there was no simple, direct way to trade on those outcomes, according to Kalshi’s website.
Lopes Lara, originally from Brazil, studied ballet at the renowned Bolshoi Theater School in Joinville before graduating and moving to Austria to pursue a professional dance career.
Scale AI cofounder Lucy Guo previously held the title for eight months.
Lopes Lara and Mansour spent the COVID pandemic heads-down building Kalshi, pushing for federal regulatory approval and securing major investors, including Charles Schwab and Sequoia Capital.
“Right out of college, we were taking on an insane amount of risk,” Lopes Lara said. “It was two years without a single product — nothing launched — and if we didn’t get regulated, the company would just go to zero.”
Kalshi received approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in November 2020, and the cofounders were recognized on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2022.
Ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the company won a lawsuit that cleared the way for it to offer legal election-related contracts — a first in the industry.
“We really wanted to do things the right way because our vision was to build the biggest financial exchange in the world,” Lopes Lara said. “Doing it legally was something we couldn’t compromise on.”
Users have placed more than $500 million in trades on the platform, wagering on the outcomes of major political and economic events.
“It’s actually the best mechanism to get more truth about who’s actually going to win,” Mansour told The Post’s NYNext, arguing that markets can outperform pundits and polls. “We’re letting the market speak.”
Kalshi describes itself as “the world’s largest global prediction market company.”
Lopes Lara — a Brazilian native — trained in ballet at the Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil before relocating to Austria to pursue a career as a professional ballerina, and later continuing her studies in the United States.
Today, both 29-year-olds — she and Mansour — own roughly 12% of Kalshi each, placing their individual net worths at an estimated $1.3 billion. According to Polymarket’s reported $9 billion valuation (per Forbes), Kalshi now ranks ahead of its main rival in the prediction-market space.
In a recent development, CNN signed a deal with Kalshi to integrate real-time prediction-market probabilities into its coverage across television, digital, and streaming platforms. As part of the agreement — reported by Axios — CNN will display a live ticker during broadcasts and allow anchors and correspondents to reference Kalshi’s probability data when discussing political, cultural, news, and weather forecasts.
The company is seeking to become the “most authoritative source of information about the real-time probabilities of major cultural and political future events,” Mansour said.
The 35-year-old “Life of a Showgirl” pop star is currently worth $1.6 billion, ahead of Guo’s $1.25 billion. Jenner lost her billionaire status after Forbes claimed her company, Kylie Cosmetics, inflated its income to spark the billion-dollar valuation, Axios reported.
Jenner, 28, is currently estimated to be worth $670 million.
