Vest Labs secures $13 million seed round led by Portal Ventures

Vest Labs raised $13 million in seed funding to expand its prop trading platform, which lets qualifying traders use company capital to trade perpetual futures in live markets around the clock.

Portal Ventures led the round, which closed in July and was announced Wednesday. Individual investors included senior executives at Citadel Securities, BlackRock and KKR, according to Fortune. Vest did not disclose its valuation.

The New York startup plans to use the funding to build a mobile app, expand its 22 person team and broaden the range of assets available for trading.

Vest’s model gives traders up to 80% of their profits, with the company retaining the remainder. The founders told Fortune that the arrangement gives Vest a direct interest in traders’ success.

That approach differs from a common retail proprietary trading model, in which users pay fees to complete simulated trading evaluations. Firms can generate revenue from those fees regardless of whether applicants eventually receive payouts.

The sector is expanding. Financial software company Track360 estimates retail prop trading revenue will reach $850 million in 2026, roughly 45% above its estimate for the previous year. CMC Markets entered the market last month through a program offering cash rewards based on simulated trading performance.

Payouts remain difficult to obtain at some established platforms. Topstep disclosed that roughly 17% of evaluations started in 2025 were successfully completed. Among traders who reached funded status, only about a third received a payout.

Vest said roughly 26% of its 27,000 traders had received a cash payout as of late September. It also reported that monthly active traders and trading volume grew more than 300% month over month. Those figures measure different stages of participation from Topstep’s disclosures and are not directly comparable.

The company was founded by University of Pennsylvania dropouts Justin Ma, Rikuya Takatsu and Maximilian Tsiang. The trio began studying crypto perpetual trading platforms in 2021 and developing algorithms to improve exchange pricing and execution.

Ma, Vest’s CEO, said he used proceeds from the sale of his earlier trading app Berri to begin trading crypto and lay the groundwork for Vest. 

He later met Portal Ventures general partner Catrina Wang at a university alumni event during the Stanford Blockchain Conference in 2024, starting discussions that led to the seed round.