Vest has raised $13 million to build a proprietary trading firm that shares traders' profits instead of profiting from simulated accounts alone.
Portal Ventures led the seed round, which closed in July, with contributions from individual backers including senior executives at Citadel Securities, BlackRock, and KKR. Vest declined to disclose its valuation.
The New York-based startup says it lets qualifying traders use company money to trade perpetual futures in real markets around the clock. The company says traders can keep up to 80% of their profits, while Vest takes the rest.
'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, said.
Vest was cofounded by Justin Ma, Rikuya Takatsu, and Maximilian Tsiang, friends and University of Pennsylvania dropouts. Ma became interested in crypto derivatives while studying finance and philosophy at Penn, where he met Takatsu and Tsiang and later worked on early exchange mechanics and trading systems.
The company says the funding will help it build a mobile app, expand its 22-person team, and broaden the range of assets users can trade around the clock. Vest said roughly 26% of its 27,000 traders had received a cash payout as of late September, and said monthly active traders and trading volume surged over 300% month-over-month.
The broader retail proprietary trading market is growing. Track360 estimates sector revenue will reach $850 million in 2026, up about 45% from its estimate for the previous year. Last month, CMC Markets launched a partnership-backed program that offers cash rewards based on simulated trading performance.
Under the standard model, traders often pay an upfront fee for a simulated evaluation, and only a minority ever receive a payout. Topstep disclosed in March that roughly 17% of evaluations started in 2025 were successfully completed, and only one-third of those who reached funded status ever received a payout.
Vest's pitch is simple: use capital, align incentives, and let the market sort out the rest. That is a cleaner structure than a system built to collect fees whether traders win or lose.
For investors, the appeal is clear. For traders, the question is whether a firm that shares profits can scale faster than one that monetizes friction. Capital rewards clear rules, and the market has already voted with growth, payouts, and fresh funding.
