Vest Labs raised a $13 million seed round to build a proprietary trading firm that lets qualifying traders use company capital to trade perpetual futures and share in real-market profits. The round, which closed in July, was led by Portal Ventures and will fund a mobile app, team expansion and a wider set of round-the-clock tradable assets.
Unlike many retail prop firms that earn from fees on simulated accounts, Vest’s model gives traders access to firm capital and splits trading profits—traders can keep up to 80% of profits, with Vest taking the remainder. “Instead of trying to improve iteratively on the prop firm business, we … just said, ‘How can we do this with the interests aligned with the user?’” Justin Ma, Vest’s CEO, said.
Portal Ventures led the seed with contributions from individual backers, including senior executives at Citadel Securities, BlackRock and KKR. Vest declined to disclose its valuation following the round. The company said it will use the funding to build a mobile app, grow its 22-person team and expand the range of assets users can trade around the clock.
How the profit-sharing model differs
Many retail proprietary trading businesses rely on fees for simulated evaluations and can profit even when traders do not succeed. Under that standard model, potential traders often pay an upfront fee to qualify for a funded account, a gate that filters most applicants. Industry figures cited by the company highlight the sector’s growth: Track360 estimates retail prop trading revenue will reach $850 million in 2026, roughly 45% higher than its estimate for the prior year. Recent market moves include London-based CMC Markets launching a partnership-backed program offering cash rewards based on simulated trading performance.
The conventional evaluation model can be difficult to clear: Topstep disclosed in March that about 17% of evaluations started in 2025 were successfully completed, and only one-third of those who reached funded status ever received a payout. Vest says its approach is gaining traction in contrast: of the platform’s roughly 27,000 traders, about 26% had received a cash payout as of late September, and the company reported monthly active traders and trading volume each surged more than 300% month over month.
Vest’s campus roots
Vest was cofounded by friends and University of Pennsylvania dropouts Justin Ma, Rikuya Takatsu and Maximilian Tsiang. Ma, 25, studied finance and philosophy and became interested in crypto derivatives while at Penn. During their junior year in 2021 the trio studied exchange designs as early crypto perpetual trading platforms gained attention; Ma said they believed some pricing systems were mathematically flawed and set out to address those issues.
That year Ma dropped out after building and selling Berri, a consumer trading app he said reached 100,000 users and was sold within months. He used proceeds from that sale to start high-frequency crypto trading and to create an open-source research forum where he published work on exchange mechanics and trade execution. At a University of Pennsylvania alumni event during the Stanford Blockchain Conference in 2024, Ma met Catrina Wang, a fellow alum and general partner at Portal Ventures, and began the conversations that led to the seed round.
For Portal’s Wang, Vest’s appeal is offering ambitious traders access to firm capital rather than requiring them to fund their own accounts. “Overall, when it comes to customer onboarding, that funded account [and] the fact that you don’t need to take your own money—you just trade capital and make money … is super differentiated,” she said.
