Luana Lopes Lara/Instagram

Luana Lopes Lara

Luana Lopes Lara co-founded Kalshi, a prediction-market company now valued at $11 billion, boosting her net worth to $1.3 billion

The former ballerina studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and overcame regulatory hurdles to launch Kalshi as a legal financial exchange

Kalshi’s trading volume has surged 1000% in a year, partnering with Robinhood, Google Finance, and the NHL

Luana Lopes Lara — a 29-year-old former ballerina turned tech founder — has unseated Taylor Swift and Lucy Guo to become the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.

The Brazilian-born entrepreneur claimed the title after her prediction-market company, Kalshi, secured a new $1 billion investment round at an $11 billion valuation, boosting her estimated net worth to $1.3 billion, according to Forbes.

That pushes her past Scale AI cofounder Guo, 31, who briefly held the title after overtaking Swift earlier this year. Swift, 35, reached billionaire status on the strength of her 2023 Eras Tour.

Kylie Jenner was previously named the world’s youngest self-made billionaire by Forbes in 2019 before the magazine walked back that valuation in 2020, claiming the Kylie Cosmetics mogul had been allegedly inflating the success of their beauty business over the years. *The Kardashians *star denied the allegations. (That June, Jenner was named the year’s highest-paid celebrity.)

For Lopes Lara, the milestone marks the latest turn in a career that began far from Silicon Valley.

She spent her teens studying ballet at the Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil, a grueling training ground where discipline was enforced with a ferocity most adults never encounter, according to Forbes.

Teachers would hold "lit cigarettes under her thigh while she extended one leg to her ear," she told the outlet, and competition among dancers could be cutthroat, with students sometimes hiding glass shards in each other’s shoes. Her days stretched from academic classes in the morning to ballet training into the night. It was the "most intense years of her life," she added.

But Lopes Lara’s dreams were beyond ballet.

Inspired by her math-teacher mother and electrical-engineer father, she chased academic competitions after hours, winning gold at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and bronze at the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad, according to the report. After graduating and performing professionally in Austria for nine months, she traded the stage for Cambridge and enrolled at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pursue computer science.