Kalshi's $22B Bet: From Kylie Jenner Gossip to Prediction Empire

Colleagues say her uniform there is casual: often Kalshi-branded gear, sometimes a T-shirt for history buffs from a website called Echos of Antiquity, and sneakers. She rarely wears makeup and said she doesn’t own a designer purse.

The office is sprinkled with inside jokes. There is a framed photo of actors Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd from the 1983 movie “Trading Places,” referencing a more recent rule that bans insider trading. Elsewhere is an image of a “South Park” episode that portrays prediction markets as corrupt.

A clip from outside Madison Square Garden that recently went viral during NBA Finals – with a fan saying, “My mayor Muslim. My bagels Jewish. My Christian Dior. Knicks in four!” – was spoken into a Kalshi-branded microphone. Kalshi recently inked a multi-year deal with the arena. Jenner’s current boyfriend, actor Timothée Chalamet, is a devoted Knicks fan who just signed his own advertising deal with Kalshi.

“My role in the company is to push for us to go for things, to go fast, take what we can and grow as much as we can,” Lopes Lara said.

Lopes Lara launched Kalshi alongside Mansour, the company’s chief executive officer, as part of a Silicon Valley hackathon. The two met while earning engineering degrees at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“She sat in the front row of every class,” said Peter Kempthorne, who taught statistics to them both. “With many students at MIT, they may not be engaged in the lectures, she was totally engaged in trying to learn as much as she could.”

Later, she and Mansour forged deeper ties at internships together, including at Five Rings and then Citadel, where the hedge fund offered a two-hour training session on prediction markets.

“We saw all aspects and sides of prediction markets that we liked,” Lopes Lara said. “That was just one of the reasons we decided to say, ‘let’s drop our extremely high-paying jobs and we’ll try to do this thing.’”

While Mansour is usually the public face of Kalshi – meeting with investors, appearing on TV or hobnobbing with policymakers – it’s Lopes Lara who’s running the company behind the scenes. She spends a lot of time with markets staff going over the bets Kalshi chooses to list and how to make the operation more efficient.

Kalshi has more than 500 templates for wagers that have already been worked through by that team. They reflect the exchange’s own forecasts for everything that could possibly happen in the world. The company uses an internally developed artificial-intelligence model to aggregate the day’s top news, analyze competitors and make other recommendations.

“We think about markets almost like a factory,” Lopes Lara said. She plans to hire another 50 people by year-end, noting that “nowadays with AI, every engineer is like five.”

Kalshi’s next big upgrade will be margin trading, something it expects to unveil later this year. That, combined with its new block-trading effort, is squarely aimed at big-money traders who work in hedge funds, corporations or other professional entities.

Its effort to grow overseas is trickier. Kalshi’s first international effort centered on Brazil through a partnership with local brokerage XP Inc. announced in March. The next month, Brazil’s government moved to ban access to prediction markets sites over illegal-gambling concerns.

Lopes Lara meets with Kalshi’s legal team every week to examine strategies and outcomes. Kalshi will never apply for a gambling license, she said, even if that would allow access to key markets where it’s currently restricted, like the UK and parts of Europe.

“We want to have one core exchange and clearinghouse that concentrates all the liquidity,” she said.

Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to the company. Lopes Lara stressed that the president’s son is not involved in any regulatory discussions. There is also Jay-Z, the businessman musician, who is an adviser and an investor through MarcyPen, the venture capital firm he co-founded. His ties to Kalshi haven’t been previously reported.

When Jay-Z visited the company’s offices earlier this year, staff asked him for advice about Kalshi’s markets related to music, Lopes Lara said.

While she can’t trade on Kalshi herself due to company rules, Lopes Lara sometimes imagines how she would. In planning an outdoor wedding, for example, one of her immediate thoughts was to create a market for whether it would rain that day.

“We can plan all these things outside, it starts raining, you move it inside and you’ve spent all this cost for the outside,” she said. “As prediction markets become more mainstream and people accept them and understand them, we’re going to see a lot more of those use cases.”