Kalshi

Tarek Mansour grew up in Lebanon, where instability taught adaptability. He attended MIT, then worked at Goldman Sachs and Citadel. Luana Lopes Lara grew up in Brazil, balancing elite ballet training with academics. They met at MIT and shared a frustration: institutions constantly wanted exposure to future events — elections, interest rates, geopolitical outcomes — but existing financial products used complex derivatives to approximate those risks. The idea behind Kalshi was deceptively simple: instead of trading proxies, allow users to trade directly on the event itself. Every lawyer they consulted told them it was impossible to get CFTC approval. They called 60 more.

In November 2020, Kalshi became the first exchange in US history to receive CFTC designation as a Designated Contract Market specifically for event contracts. The regulatory approval took two years of intensive engagement with the Commission. It gave Kalshi legitimacy that crypto-native competitors like Polymarket could not claim — and differentiated it from both traditional gambling and from the speculative derivatives markets that had previously been the only venue for event-based risk. The site launched publicly in July 2021.

When the CFTC attempted to block Kalshi from offering political event contracts, Kalshi did something almost no startup would dare: they sued the regulator that oversaw them. "It's very hard for a startup to sue the part of the government that oversees you because they have all the power over you," Mansour said. In 2024, a DC District Court ruled that the CFTC had overstepped. An appellate court rejected the CFTC's request for a stay. Kalshi relaunched its congressional control betting operations. The legal victory unlocked the company's defining growth moment: the 2024 election was weeks away.

After winning in court, Kalshi had one month before the 2024 US election. The company had approximately 20-25 employees. Traffic exploded. At one point, Kalshi was forced to migrate clearinghouse infrastructure over a single weekend — a process that normally takes six months. CNN and CNBC began publishing Kalshi probability data alongside polls and expert forecasts. In 2025, a Federal Reserve working paper found the platform matched or outperformed traditional Wall Street tools on indicators including inflation and interest rates. Kalshi was generating $263.5 million in fee revenue in 2025.

Kalshi raised $1 billion in a Series F in May 2026, led by Coatue Management with Sequoia, a16z, Paradigm, Morgan Stanley, and ARK Invest participating, valuing the company at $22 billion. Annualised trading volume had jumped from $52 billion to $178 billion in six months. Kalshi claimed more than 90% of US prediction market activity. Simultaneously, the platform was fighting a multi-front legal war: Ohio ruled its products amounted to gambling; Washington filed a lawsuit; the CFTC filed counter-suits against multiple states claiming exclusive jurisdiction. Donald Trump Jr. joined as a strategic advisor. Tarek Mansour's net worth reached $2.6 billion. The two MIT students who had decided to get regulated before getting customers had built the most consequential new financial platform in the United States.