Kalshi's CEO is Tarek Mansour, who co-founded the company with Luana Lopes Lara in 2018. The two met at MIT, worked in finance, and spent two years convincing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to register the first exchange built around event contracts, which it did in November 2020. The company launched publicly in July 2021, sued its own regulator over election markets in 2023 and won in 2024, and by 2026 was valued at $22 billion. Mansour remains CEO.
The founders
Tarek Mansour is the chief executive and the company's public face: he's the one on CNBC, in the congressional hearings and in the court filings. Luana Lopes Lara, the other co-founder, has been described in company materials as leading operations and product; she appeared alongside Mansour on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in 2021. Both were MIT students who had worked at financial firms and found that there was no legal way in the US to trade on the outcome of an event.
The idea
Prediction markets had existed academically (the Iowa Electronic Markets) and offshore, but never as a federally regulated exchange. Mansour and Lopes Lara's bet was that event contracts could be classified as commodities derivatives and regulated by the CFTC rather than as gambling regulated by states. That theory is Kalshi's entire legal foundation, and it's the one being tested in court today.
Timeline
- 2018: company founded (first named Kownig), San Francisco; Y Combinator.
- November 2020: CFTC approves Kalshi as a Designated Contract Market.
- July 2021: public launch.
- September 2023: CFTC rejects Kalshi's contracts on control of Congress; Kalshi sues.
- 2024: district court and DC Circuit side with Kalshi; election markets go live before the November election.
- 2025: sports contracts, Robinhood partnership, CNN and CNBC deals; Series E at $11bn.
- 2026: Series F at $22bn; $2bn+ revenue run rate; state lawsuits and a circuit split on the way to the Supreme Court.
What Mansour has argued
His consistent public position is that Kalshi is a financial exchange, that event contracts are a new asset class rather than bets, and that federal regulation protects users better than fifty state regimes. States, several appeals judges and the tribes disagree about the sports part. See Is Kalshi gambling?.
Sources: Wikipedia (Kalshi), Forbes 30 Under 30 (2021), CFTC orders, court records.