Carsi co-founder Luana López Lara spends her days thinking about probability. With an elite degree in Mathematics and a role at one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, she has a natural mindset focused on thinking clearly about potential outcomes. But the youngest self-made billionaire still had to overcome tough hurdles to bet on herself and build America’s largest prediction market trading business. She says none of this would have happened without a risk-taking approach that many people, especially women, don’t follow.
Founded in 2018 by MIT classmates López Lara and Tarek Mansour, Kalshi allows users to trade contracts tied to real-world outcomes in areas as diverse as weather, sports, pop culture, economics, and politics. Users buy a “yes” or “no” contract tied to whether an event will occur, and the price reflects that probability.
But it took years for the seemingly simple idea to become a new type of regulated financial market, and the co-founders faced numerous government battles and skepticism from their own board of directors. When López Lara and Mansour first started the project, many people said it wouldn’t work. “(It) looked like it wasn’t going anywhere for years,” López Lara told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin on the latest episode of the podcast “CNBC Changemakers and Power Players.”
López Lara has been named to the 2026 CNBC Changemakers list.
López-Lara said Carsi spent years navigating the regulatory process before receiving approval in 2020 from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees the U.S. derivatives market. “I talked to a lot of people at the time and they said, ‘That’s not possible.’ The odds are less than 1 percent. It’s never going to happen,” she recalled.
She said being naive, but also ambitious given her background with a math degree from MIT, may have helped her co-founders move forward even though they had no experience in starting a business. “We solved a difficult math problem, and we’re going to solve this regulatory and government problem,” she recalled of their thinking. At the end of what she described as an “all-nighter” at MIT, “we were like, why don’t we try this? Because we’re spending so much time on this, at some point, maybe we should try and see if we can make this happen somewhere. If anyone’s going to make this happen, it should be us. … We fell so in love with this problem and this idea,” she said.
On Tuesday, May 20, 2025, in New York, USA, Tarek Mansour, co-founder of QALSI Inc., departed, and Luana López Lara, co-founder of QALSI Inc. departed.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Rather than retreat when regulators expressed concerns, the founders repeatedly conducted legal research and data analysis to defend their claims to prediction markets. The years-long battle culminated when López Lara called for a lawsuit against the U.S. government over electoral markets ahead of the 2024 presidential election after talks with regulators stalled. “(One of) the biggest events in the world that happens once every four years is the American election,” López Lara said. “The electoral market is truly the holy grail.”
The company spent more than two years with the CFTC trying to get election market approval, but López-Lara ultimately decided the company’s “only option” was to sue the government.
The forces that pushed her aside in this decision included the company’s board of directors. “For almost two years, every time the board met, we went to the board and said, ‘We’re working on an election. We’re working on an election. We’re working on an election.’ … They always said, ‘It’s not going to work.’ It’s not going to work. It doesn’t work. ”
She had to inform the board that the founders had decided to sue, even though the board had advised them to focus on other business opportunities. But for López Lara, it was simple. The odds were in their favor. “There’s no point in not doing this,” she recalled thinking at the time. The board ultimately upheld the decision, but in the month leading up to the court’s decision, López-Lara said, “I didn’t sleep, I didn’t exercise. I was like a potato, just walking around trying to process everything.”
Mr. Kalsi won the case and the results speak for themselves. Since this precedent, Kalsi’s trading volume has grown to $2 billion per week. During New York City’s mayoral election week, Carsi generated more than $130 million in election-related transactions. Most recently, Carsi recorded nearly $1 billion in trading volume during the Super Bowl. The company recently raised $1 billion from investors at a valuation of $11 billion.
Kalsi continues to shape today’s events, with deals made in connection with recent news deals on economic downturn risks from the US-Iran war. But that growth has been fraught with controversy. Prediction market trading related to events in Iran or U.S. military actions quickly met with opposition, including from Congress, and there are also widespread concerns about insider trading. Carsi is also embroiled in multiple legal disputes over whether its contracts should be regulated as gambling under state law, as the gaming industry devotes significant resources to lobbying efforts targeting what it sees as loopholes in prediction markets.
López Lara said he believes strongly in both the company’s legal arguments and its future. However, when deciding whether to form a company in the first place, the company needed to plan for all possible scenarios and prepare for all potential outcomes, including failure. She took a very Kalsi approach to the decision.
“The best way I think about decision-making is to make sure you have all the data you can about the situation, plan out possible scenarios, and apply probabilities to it,” López-Lara said.
This approach reflects her broader philosophy on risk and entrepreneurship. She believes that many people avoid pursuing ambitious ideas because they focus too much on the negatives, but in her experience, the worst outcomes are often not as severe as people think.
“Most people seem to be afraid to take risks… They’re so worried about the downside. They’re so worried about what will happen if things go wrong. But most of the time, people are overthinking it,” López Lara said. “If you quit your job to do this…if you fail, you’re done. No, you’ll probably just get another job and maybe you’ll fall a little behind where you are. And maybe you’ll never get a promotion, but that’s about it. It’s very easy to fool yourself into justifying your fear of taking risks,” she said.
“If you actually plan out the whole tree, you’ll find that most of the time it’s not that bad. Of course there are financial risks and all those things and a lot of other considerations. But I think people, especially women, need to take more risks and be honest with themselves about why they’re not doing it, because I think a lot of times it’s just fear.”
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Disclosure: CNBC and Kalsi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and minority ownership.
