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Vest raises $13M to build a prop trading firm that profits when its traders do
The New York startup lets qualifying traders use company capital on perpetual futures and pays out in USDC
Most retail prop trading firms have a quiet secret: they can do just fine when their customers lose. Vest Labs wants to build one that only wins when its traders do.
The New York-based startup announced Wednesday that it has raised a $13 million seed round. The round closed in July and was led by Portal Ventures.
The pitch is simple. Qualifying traders get company money to trade perpetual futures in live markets, around the clock, and Vest takes a cut of the gains. No simulated accounts, no profiting from failure.
How the Vest model works
Many retail prop trading firms charge fees for simulated trading accounts. Traders pay for the chance to prove themselves, and the firm earns money whether those traders succeed or blow up. Revenue comes from the fees, not from market returns.
Vest says it flips the arrangement. Through its platform, Vest Markets, qualifying traders deploy company capital on perpetual futures tied to equity indices, crypto, and commodities.
Perpetual futures are derivatives that let traders bet on an asset’s price without owning it. Unlike traditional futures, they have no expiry date, so positions can stay open as long as the trader keeps them funded.
Traders using the Vest Capital program can keep up to 80% of profits from real-market trading. On specific account types, that figure rises to up to 95%.
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The numbers behind the round
Vest was cofounded by Justin Ma, Rikuya Takatsu, and Maximilian Tsiang. The three are friends and University of Pennsylvania dropouts, with Ma serving as CEO.
Beyond lead investor Portal Ventures, executives at Citadel Securities, BlackRock, and KKR participated in their personal capacities.
This is also not Vest’s first fundraise. The company previously raised around $10 million from investors including Jane Street, Amber Group, and QCP Capital.
On traction, the company reported approximately 27,000 traders on its platform as of late September. Of those, 26% have received cash payouts in USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin.
Vest also says both monthly active users and trading volumes have grown more than 300% month-over-month. The company plans to put the new capital toward three goals:
- Building a mobile app
- Hiring additional staff beyond its current 22 employees
- Expanding the range of assets available on the platform
Where crypto infrastructure fits in
The firm runs its perpetual futures exchange on a real-time risk pricing engine called zkRisk. The job of a risk engine is to continuously assess how dangerous each position is, so the platform knows when exposure is getting out of hand.
The choice of USDC for payouts lets Vest settle quickly and across borders, which fits a platform that operates 24 hours a day across crypto and traditional asset markets.
The backer lineup reinforces the hybrid identity. Jane Street is a quantitative trading heavyweight, while Amber Group and QCP Capital are known names in crypto trading. Vest sits at the intersection, borrowing the prop trading structure from traditional finance and running it on digital-asset rails.