Who Owns Kalshi?

Kalshi was founded in 2018 in San Francisco by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, who met at MIT. Mansour, who was born in California and raised partly in Lebanon, interned on Goldman Sachs' equity derivatives desk in 2016, where he saw how institutions struggled to hedge event risk directly. Lopes Lara, from Brazil, trained at a ballet academy affiliated with the Bolshoi before studying computer science at MIT and interning at Bridgewater and Citadel.

The company's founding insight was that no regulated venue let people trade directly on event outcomes. The name comes from the Arabic word for everything. Regulatory approval took two years: in November 2020 the CFTC designated Kalshi a Designated Contract Market, and the platform publicly launched in July 2021 with markets on economics, weather, and public events.

The pivotal shift came with elections. The CFTC initially blocked Kalshi's congressional control markets, but Kalshi sued and won in September 2024, when a federal court ruled the regulator had overstepped. Kalshi listed presidential election contracts weeks before the 2024 vote, and trading exploded. The company then moved into sports event contracts in early 2025, a category that now accounts for roughly two-thirds of volume but triggered cease-and-desist orders from state gambling regulators in Nevada, New Jersey, Maryland, and elsewhere, plus litigation that reached a stage where the Supreme Court may decide the federal-versus-state jurisdiction question.

Growth has been extraordinary. Kalshi was valued at $11 billion in a December 2025 round, $22 billion in May 2026, and roughly $40 billion in funding talks reported in late September 2026. Press reports cited an annualized revenue run rate above $4 billion by mid-2026, driven partly by World Cup wagering. The company integrated with Robinhood and other brokerages, expanded internationally, and hired aggressively ahead of a possible IPO that CEO Mansour has said could come as early as 2027.