Fast facts
- Division: Featherweight (unified champion; WBO title since 2019, IBO since 2021, WBA since 2023)
- Record: 50 wins, 32 by knockout, and four losses, three of them to Katie Taylor
- Nationality: American, born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, raised in Brooklyn
- Team/gym: Managed and trained by Jordan Maldonado; Boxing 360’s first world champion; signed to Most Valuable Promotions on a lifetime deal
- Notable wins: Erika Cruz (undisputed featherweight title), Heather Hardy (twice), Sarah Mahfoud, Daniela Bermudez, Eva Voraberger, Maria Maderna
The birthday posts started early on October 9. Most Valuable Promotions called her the MOAT, the WBO posted its own tribute, and Jake Paul went somewhere more personal. He posted that the two of them first met on the same card where he made his pro debut, and he signed off with three words: “Not done yet.” Within a couple of hours Serrano replied to Paul and his business partner Nakisa Bidarian: “My Loyalty will always be here for you both.”
She turned 38 that day. She still holds world titles. That’s the part worth sitting with.
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The kid who tagged along
Serrano was born in Carolina, the same municipality as her older sister Cindy and their grandparents, and the family moved to New York when she was young. They landed in Brooklyn, inside the Nuyorican community, where the food and the salsa music were Puerto Rican even if the zip code wasn’t. Her Spanish still carries that Spanglish accent.
Boxing wasn’t her idea. Cindy started training to lose weight at the gym run by her husband, Jordan Maldonado, and 12-year-old Amanda went along. She was a swimmer, an active kid with no particular pull toward the ring. When the family gathered to watch Oscar De La Hoya fight Félix Trinidad, she didn’t bother showing up. But she kept hanging around Maldonado’s place, eventually took her first job there, and followed Cindy’s career closely enough that something took root.
After graduating from Bushwick High School at 17, she decided to train for real, partly to make money and partly to be closer to her sister. Her father backed her. Her mother needed convincing, and what convinced her was success, plus the idea that Amanda’s rise might let Cindy retire after her second child. Cindy, who knew Amanda had once gotten frustrated sparring a boy, tried to scare her off by getting in the ring with her herself. It didn’t work. The younger sister held her own.
Serrano is shy, by her own account, and she chose to stay in Maldonado’s small gym in Queens precisely because it was small. Fewer people coming through meant fewer distractions. I love this detail, because it explains a lot about a fighter who has spent 15 years in the same corner with the same man. Maldonado still manages and trains her, and he rarely gets talked about in proportion to what he built.
Her amateur run was short, 9-1, with a Staten Island title in 2008 and a New York Daily News Golden Gloves featherweight crown, beating USA Boxing national champion Jody-Ann Weller in the final.
Climbing everything
The pro career moved fast. In June 2011 she knocked out Jennifer Scott in 1:04 of Round 1 for the vacant WBC-NABF featherweight title. By September she’d stopped Kimberly Connor in the second round for the vacant IBF super featherweight belt.
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Then came Sweden. On April 27, 2012, in Linköping, she fought undefeated WBC champion Frida Wallberg in a bout the WBC allowed to use 10-ounce gloves instead of the mandatory eight. Serrano lost a unanimous decision widely seen as controversial, on cards of 98-93, 97-93 and 96-94.
What followed was one of the stranger and more impressive résumés in boxing. She went to Argentina and knocked out Maria Maderna in the sixth for the WBO lightweight title. She stopped Olivia Gerula in the first round for the WBO featherweight belt. She dropped to junior featherweight in 2016 and stopped Alexandra Lazar, tying Miguel Cotto’s mark of four weight classes. A year later she knocked out Dahianna Santana in the eighth for the WBO bantamweight title, becoming the first woman to win world titles in five divisions. In September 2018 she went all the way up to light welterweight and outpointed Yamilia Esther Reynoso. And on January 18, 2019, she stopped Eva Voraberger in the first round at super flyweight, joining Manny Pacquiao as only the second boxer, male or female, with major titles in seven weight classes.
Guinness recognizes it as the record for a woman: nine major world titles across seven divisions.
Home at 126
Featherweight is where she settled. She beat the undefeated Heather Hardy (22-0) in September 2019 on scores of 98-91, 98-91 and 98-92, then in March 2021 went to San Juan and folded Daniela Bermudez with a body shot in the ninth. Two Ring pound-for-pound top-10 fighters, one punch to the ribs.
The night that changed her public profile was a loss. On April 30, 2022, she and Katie Taylor became the first women to headline Madison Square Garden, with Taylor’s undisputed lightweight titles at stake. Taylor won a split decision, and Sports Illustrated named it Fight of the Year.
Serrano went back down and went to work. She beat undefeated IBF champion Sarah Mahfoud by scores of 99-92, 97-93 and 97-93. Then, on February 4, 2023, at the Hulu Theatre in Manhattan, she beat Erika Cruz 98-92, 98-92, 97-93 to become undisputed, the first fighter from Puerto Rico, male or female, to do it in the four-belt era.
She also picked a fight with the WBC that had nothing to do with an opponent. In October 2023 she beat Danila Ramos over 12 three-minute rounds, the first women’s world title fight at that distance since 2007. WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman refused to sanction it and told the BBC he was “praying that there will be no mishap or injury due to this deeply misguided and mistaken initiative.” That December, Serrano gave up the WBC belt rather than go back to shorter fights.
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Taylor, again and again
The rematch with Taylor was supposed to happen in Dublin in May 2023 until a training camp injury pulled Serrano out. It finally happened on November 15, 2024, at AT&T Stadium on the Paul vs. Mike Tyson card, and Taylor won a unanimous decision. Netflix said 50 million households watched. The trilogy, on July 11, 2025, headlined the first all-women’s card at the Garden, and Taylor won again, this time by majority decision.
Three of Serrano’s four career losses belong to one rival. Losing close fights to an elite opponent three times says more about Serrano’s level than it takes away from it.
Where she stands
She didn’t stop. A planned January 3, 2026, rematch with Cruz in San Juan fell through after what the promotion called “an atypical finding in Erika Cruz’s Voluntary Anti-Doping Association (VADA) testing conducted prior to the event.” Replacement Reina Tellez missed weight, and Serrano beat her by unanimous decision over 10 three-minute rounds. On May 30, 2026, in El Paso, she won by second-round TKO for the 32nd stoppage of her career.
As of December 2025, The Ring and BoxRec rated her the best active female featherweight, with The Ring putting her second pound for pound and ESPN third. Her lifetime MVP contract also makes her a future chairwoman overseeing the promotion’s women’s boxing efforts, and the WBO’s birthday message pointed to the Amanda Serrano Championships Tournament she runs for young fighters.
No next opponent has been announced. Paul’s post is the only hint, and it fits a woman who once skipped the family fight party and then stayed in a small Queens gym for the rest of her life.
