Vest Labs, a New York based proprietary trading startup, has raised 13 million dollars in seed funding led by Portal Ventures. The headline is a funding round, but the substance of the pitch is really about trust. Retail prop trading has a well earned reputation problem, most firms in the category profit when traders fail an evaluation, not when they actually succeed at trading. Vest built its entire business model around being the exception to that rule.
The founders and how they got here
Vest was founded by three University of Pennsylvania dropouts, Justin Ma, 25, who serves as CEO, Rikuya Takatsu, and Maximilian Tsiang. The three met as roommates and began studying crypto derivatives and exchange mechanics together during their junior year in 2021. Ma had already built a consumer trading brand once before, founding Berri, a trading app that reached 100,000 users prior to being sold, so this is not his first attempt at winning trader trust with a product.
The incentive problem they're explicitly selling against
Ma described the founding insight plainly, saying 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. That line targets a specific, well documented flaw in the category. Most traditional prop firms charge traders upfront fees for simulated trading evaluations with notoriously low success rates, Topstep, one of the larger firms in the space, has reported that only 17 percent of evaluations are completed successfully, and just a third of those traders ever receive a payout. For most customers in this category, the firm gets paid and the trader gets nothing. That structure is precisely what Vest's brand pitch is built to be the opposite of.
How the actual model differs
Qualifying traders on Vest use real company capital to trade real perpetual futures, not a simulated account designed to generate evaluation fees. Traders keep up to 80 percent of their profits, with Vest taking the remainder, which means the company only makes meaningful money when its traders are genuinely winning, not when they wash out early. That single structural decision is doing most of the brand positioning work for the company.
Who's backing the pitch
Portal Ventures led the 13 million dollar seed round, with backing from senior executives at Citadel Securities, BlackRock, and KKR. The company's valuation was not disclosed. Portal Ventures general partner Catrina Wang summed up the appeal this way, the fact that you don't need to take your own money, you just trade capital and make money, is super differentiated, a line that describes exactly the trust gap Vest is positioning itself to close.
The market it's stepping into
Retail prop trading is genuinely booming. The category is projected to generate 850 million dollars in revenue in 2026, up 45 percent year over year. Vest reports that roughly 26 percent of its 27,000 traders had received a cash payout by late September, with monthly active traders and trading volume both up more than 300 percent month over month, real early growth, though still a small slice of a market that size.
What the money is actually going toward
The new funding is earmarked for building out a mobile app, growing the team beyond its current 22 employees, and expanding the range of assets traders can access, in other words, scaling the exact aligned incentive model the brand is built around rather than drifting away from it.
The brand bet underneath the funding round
What makes this worth watching from a brand standpoint is the approach itself. Vest is not trying to out market an industry known for bad incentives with slicker advertising, it is trying to out structure it, building the trust argument directly into how the company makes money. If that aligned incentive story holds up as Vest scales past its first 27,000 traders, it will have done something most fintech brands only pay lip service to, let the business model itself carry the marketing claim.
