Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour

Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara met in a class at MIT: she always sat up front and he wanted to learn from her, she says. As they got to know each other through the school’s international community—she’s from Brazil, he was raised in Lebanon—they eventually collaborated to found a company that would help popularize prediction markets, which had long been discussed in academic circles but never successfully marketed to the public.The result, Kalshi, is today one of the world’s most popular prediction markets. It allows people to wager on things like the future GOP presidential nominee and the price of diesel, and has been extremely accurate at predicting the outcome of events like elections. Lopes Lara and Mansour say Kalshi democratizes a realm formerly available only to Wall Street traders, who could bet on the price of oil or pork through futures trading.Kalshi has been challenged in court by states like New York and Washington, which accuse it of being an illegal gambling operation—but the company maintains that its business is lawful, and, notably, investors are huge fans. As the company tries to raise more funding, it is now reportedly valued at $40 billion, nearly double w...