TAREK MANSOUR

Age: 25 • Cofounder and CEO, Kalshi

New York–based Kalshi lets investors place unusual bets on future events, such as how many Americans will ultimately receive a Covid-19 vaccine. While he was at Goldman Sachs, Mansour’s clients wanted to hedge their investments during Brexit but had no direct way to do it. So in 2018, he started working on Kalshi with fellow MIT alum Luana Lopes Lara. The hardest part: regulatory approval. “In one day we both called 65 lawyers,” Mansour says. “All of whom said, ‘People have been trying to do this since the ’80s, and it’s not happening.’ ” But they persevered— and in November 2020, Kalshi became the first federally regulated event-based trading exchange in U.S. history. Billionaires Charles Schwab and Henry Kravis have invested alongside blue-chip VC shop Sequoia; Kalshi has raised $36 million and processed $10 million in trades since launching in July 2021.