Every lawyer they called said no. By one Bloomberg account, Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara cold-called about sixty lawyers they found on Google while at Y Combinator, and each told them to give up. Another account says more than forty. They wanted to build an exchange where anyone could trade on whether something would happen, and nobody wanted to explain how.
Lopes Lara was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1996. Before she did math she did ballet. She trained for eight years at a Bolshoi academy in Joinville and later spent a few months working on a Swan Lake production at the Salzburger Landestheater in Austria. She also won a gold medal at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze in the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad. Somewhere between the stage and MIT she changed disciplines. The sources do not say why.
She also won a gold medal at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze in the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad.
Mansour was born in California to Lebanese parents and raised in Lebanon, then returned to the US in 2014 for MIT. The two met there. They graduated in 2018, he in mathematics and computer science, she in computer science. Mansour interned at Goldman in 2016 and traded at Citadel until 2018; Lopes Lara interned at Bridgewater and Citadel Securities. Mansour has said those jobs inspired Kalshi. The company was first called Kownig.
Then the wall. Sources differ on whether it was 2018 or 2019, but Y Combinator took them, and Michael Seibel has said the idea was so unlikely to succeed that he had to take a chance. Rather than dodge regulators, the founders slowed down, hired lawyers and walked into the CFTC's office voluntarily. In November 2020 Kalshi was licensed as a designated contract market and in July 2021 it launched publicly.
The next fight was longer. From 2022 the CFTC delayed election contracts, and in September 2023 it rejected Kalshi's congressional-control contracts. Kalshi sued. In 2024 a federal court said the agency had overstepped, an appeals court refused to pause the ruling, and the markets reopened.
What followed was stranger than the plan. Sports became about 89 percent of fee revenue, roughly $263.5 million in 2025. Valuation reached $11 billion after a $1 billion round in December 2025, then $22 billion in a $1 billion Series F by May 2026, and Forbes called both founders billionaires. Lopes Lara, with roughly 12 percent ownership, became the youngest self-made woman billionaire.
The ballet years suggest what she brought: eight years of repeating one thing until it was clean, then taking it into a field where hearing no sixty times was the work. They treated the regulator as the first customer to win, not an enemy to avoid.