Company: Kalshi
Title: Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer
Industry: Financial Services
Standout achievement in 2025: Became the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire at age 29 and cemented Kalshi's status as a leading regulated prediction-market platform.
Lopes Lara leads internal operations including product, ops, engineering, and design for the world's largest predictions market, leveraging her experience as a quantitative trader at Citadel Securities and software engineer at Bridgewater Associates, and her MIT engineering and computer science degree.
She served in a pivotal role for Kalshi's growth in the past year, including making the call to sue the government to allow election event contracts, a case which Kalshi won in October. Since that legal precedent, Kalshi has grown to $2 billion in transactions per week, and the week of the New York City mayoral election, Kalsi did over $130 million in election-related transaction volume. The company recently raised $1 billion from investors at an $11 billion valuation.
Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes a minority investment.
