Kalshi

Tarek Mansour grew up in Algeria and came to MIT on a scholarship. Luana Lopes Lara grew up in Brazil, the daughter of a schoolteacher, and danced at an elite ballet academy affiliated with the Bolshoi before choosing mathematics. They met in an MIT classroom, ended up in many of the same courses, co-authored papers, and interned at the same firms — Mansour at Goldman Sachs and Citadel, Lara at Bridgewater and Citadel. What they observed across those firms was the same thing: an enormous amount of financial decision-making was being driven by opinions about future events, but there was no clean, direct way to trade on those events. You could trade the equity of a company that would be affected by an election result, but you could not trade the election result itself. In 2018, they founded Kalshi to close that gap. The approach was different from every prediction market before them: instead of operating offshore, accepting cryptocurrency, or relying on a fragile regulatory no-action letter, Kalshi would become a fully licensed US exchange. They joined Y Combinator in 2019 and spent the next two years in direct negotiation with the CFTC — a process that had never been completed by a prediction market operator.

The CFTC approval came in November 2020, making Kalshi a Designated Contract Market — the highest regulatory designation available and the same category as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Mansour and Lara were among the youngest founders to win CFTC approval in over a decade. The platform launched its first contract in July 2021. Sequoia Capital led a $30 million Series A. Henry Kissinger and Robert Shiller joined as advisors. The 2024 presidential election was the inflection point: over $800 million was wagered on political markets. When the CFTC under the Biden administration moved to block Kalshi's election markets — arguing they were contrary to the public interest — Lara made the call to sue the federal government. "The only option," she later said, "was to sue." Kalshi won in federal court in September 2024. The ruling opened election markets. Sports markets followed. $238 billion in annual trading volume followed that.

By 2026, Kalshi commands 80% of regulated US prediction market volume alongside Polymarket. A valuation of $22 billion is being discussed in new funding conversations. Forbes named both Mansour and Lara billionaires in December 2025 — Lara becoming the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. The company is also fighting on seven legal fronts simultaneously. New York filed a $36 billion lawsuit against Kalshi in July 2026, arguing its sports event contracts are illegal gambling. Utah handed Kalshi its first complete federal court defeat in August 2026, with a judge ordering the case entirely closed and ruling that federal preemption does not protect Kalshi's sports contracts from state gambling law. Appeals are pending in seven of thirteen federal circuits. The CFTC itself is defending Kalshi in court. What started as a two-year regulatory application is now a constitutional question: who gets to decide what counts as gambling in America.