The booming retail proprietary trading industry can make money even when its traders don’t. Rather than relying on live market returns, many of these firms charge fees for simulated trading accounts, letting them profit whether users succeed or fail. New York-based startup Vest Labs says it’s taking a different approach by letting qualifying traders use company money to trade perpetual futures in real markets around the clock. Vest shares in their profits rather than betting against them.
Cofounded by friends and University of Pennsylvania dropouts Justin Ma, Rikuya Takatsu, and Maximilian Tsiang, Vest announced Wednesday that it had raised a $13 million seed round, which closed in July.
In an interview with Fortune, the founders explained that their model lets traders keep up to 80% of their profits, with the company taking the rest—an arrangement that gives Vest a stake in their success.
“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?’” Ma, Vest’s CEO, told Fortune.
Portal Ventures led the funding round with contributions from individual backers, including senior executives at Citadel Securities, BlackRock, and KKR. Vest declined to disclose its valuation following the seed round.
The company intends to use the funding to build a mobile app, expand its 22-person team, and broaden the range of assets users can trade around the clock.
Retail proprietary trading is a growing business. Track360, a financial software firm that tracks industry metrics, estimates the sector’s revenue will reach $850 million in 2026, up about 45% from its estimate for the previous year. Last month, London-based financial services firm CMC Markets became the latest company to move into retail prop trading when it announced a partnership-backed program that offers cash rewards based on simulated trading performance.
Under the standard model, qualifying for those rewards requires potential traders to pay an upfront fee for a simulated evaluation of their trading skills–a hurdle that filters out the vast majority of applicants. Even for those who pass, collecting a payout is far from guaranteed. Topstep, a futures prop-trading firm, disclosed in March that roughly 17% of evaluations started in 2025 were successfully completed. Among the minority who reached funded status, only one-third ever received a payout.
Vest said its model is gaining traction. According to the company, roughly 26% of the platform’s 27,000 traders had received a cash payout as of late September, while the platform’s monthly active traders and trading volume surged over 300% month-over-month.
Vest’s campus roots
Ma, 25, became interested in crypto derivatives while studying finance and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. There, he became close friends and roommates with Takatsu, whom he described as a “human calculator,” and Tsiang. During their junior year in 2021, as early crypto perpetual trading platforms gained attention, the three began to study how exchanges worked. Ma said they believed the pricing systems used by some early decentralized trading platforms were mathematically flawed and set out to address those problems.
That year, Ma dropped out after building and selling Berri, a consumer trading app that he said reached 100,000 users and was sold within months. The trio spent months together in a house designing algorithms to improve how exchanges support trading.
Ma used the proceeds from Berri’s sale to begin high-frequency crypto trading and lay the groundwork for Vest, starting with an open-source research forum where he published papers on how exchanges work and trades are executed.
At a University of Pennsylvania alumni event during the Stanford Blockchain Conference in 2024, Ma met Catrina Wang, a fellow alumna and general partner at Portal Ventures. He pitched Vest to her for the first time, beginning a conversation that ultimately led to the startup’s seed round.
For Wang, Vest’s appeal is its ability to reach traders with more ambition than money, giving them access to company 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.
The post Exclusive: Portal Ventures-backed Vest raises $13 million to build a proprietary trading firm that shares traders’ profits appeared first on Fortune.
