Kalshi’s Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour have turned a bold, outsider idea into a $2 billion company reshaping how Americans bet on the future – legally.
When Tarek Mansour, an Algerian-born quant whiz, met Luana Lopes Lara, a Brazilian financial analyst, in college, the two bonded over something unusual: a shared obsession with uncertainty.
Years later, that obsession turned into Kalshi, that claims to be the first and only federally regulated prediction market in the US, where people legally trade on real-world events like elections, interest rates, inflation reports, and even the Oscars. Earlier this month, the company announced a $185 million Series C round, vaulting its valuation to $2 billion.
But beneath the headline lies a deeper story about immigrant founders, regulatory grit, and redefining who gets to build America’s financial infrastructure.
A billion-dollar bet on “What If?”
Kalshi’s premise is simple: let people trade yes-or-no contracts on the likelihood of events happening. Will the Fed raise rates? Will a recession hit before Q4? Will a hurricane make landfall in Florida this season?
But making that idea legal in the US was anything but simple.
Founded in 2018, Kalshi spent over two years in regulatory limbo. While crypto prediction markets like Polymarket moved fast and broke things, Kalshi chose a tougher path: becoming a fully licensed exchange under the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
That made Lara and Mansour, both under 30 at the time, among the youngest founders to win CFTC approval in over a decade. It also made Kalshi the first CFTC-regulated event exchange in the US, offering Wall Street-grade infrastructure for hedging against real-world events.
Lara grew up in Brazil, the daughter of a schoolteacher. Mansour, who immigrated from Algeria to the US, was raised in a working-class family. They both met at MIT and built early prototypes of Kalshi while still in school.
They soon realised their backgrounds, outside the Wall Street mold, were as much a superpower as a challenge.
That vision helped Kalshi attract early support from Sequoia Capital, Neo, and Y Combinator. But it was their regulatory victory and the massive political battle over offering markets on the US elections that put them on the map.
Betting on democracy
Kalshi faced intense scrutiny in 2023 when it petitioned the CFTC to offer political event markets like whether a party would win the House or Senate. The CFTC initially rejected the proposal, citing concerns over election integrity.
After a legal appeal and public debate, Kalshi won the right to offer those markets in late 2024, just in time for the US midterms.
Within weeks, trading volumes surged. By early 2025, sports and political markets combined made up nearly 80% of Kalshi’s platform activity.
That mainstream breakthrough helped fuel Kalshi’s latest round, led by crypto-native VC Paradigm, with participation from existing investors and new backers including Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao (investing personally).
Building the Bloomberg Terminal of uncertainty
Kalshi isn’t trying to be a sportsbook or a casino. Its founders say the goal is to build something more like a Bloomberg Terminal for real-world uncertainty where everyone from retail traders to farmers to CFOs can hedge or express views on future events.
The startup is currently integrated with Robinhood and Webull, with plans to expand access across brokerages and trading platforms.
Kalshi has now raised over $415 million in total funding, and reportedly employs more than 70 people, and is doubling its engineering and regulatory teams to prepare for international expansion.
Diversity, decentralisation, and the next generation
In an industry still dominated by white, Ivy League, finance-native founders, Kalshi is a rare exception. Both Lara and Mansour are first-generation immigrants, non-US born, and self-made in a space with high barriers to entry – legally, technically, and financially.
And now, with $185 million in fresh capital and regulatory precedent on their side, Kalshi is making sure the next billion-dollar idea doesn’t just belong to Wall Street.
A Polymarket rival?
On the blockchain front, Shayne Coplan, an American coding prodigy, founded Polymarket in 2020. Though US users were geo-blocked after a 2022 CFTC fine, Polymarket has been sucessful offshore, attracting celebrity backers like Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Vitalik Buterin. The platform is now nearing a $200 million raise at a $1 billion valuation, making it crypto’s next unicorn.
That success is anchored in record-setting election-season volumes and a strategic partnership with Elon Musk’s X and xAI.
While Kalshi chose regulation, Polymarket embraced crypto. FBI raids, CFTC fines, and a US block wouldn’t stop it: built by Shayne Coplan from his New York apartment, Polymarket now operates offshore on Polygon and Ethereum.
