Penn Dropouts Raise $13M for a Prop Firm That Shares the Upside

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Proprietary trading firms for retail traders have a reputation problem: many earn money from evaluation fees rather than from traders actually winning. Vest, a New York startup also known as Vest Labs, says it wants to flip that model, and it has raised a $13 million seed round to try. The round, which closed in July 2026, was led by Portal Ventures, with individual backers including senior executives at Citadel Securities, BlackRock and KKR. The valuation was not disclosed.

Three roommates and a trading model

CEO Justin Ma studied finance and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania before dropping out in 2021. He had built and sold Berri, a consumer trading app he says reached 100,000 users, then moved into high-frequency crypto trading and published research on how exchanges work. His co-founders, Rikuya Takatsu and Maximilian Tsiang, were Penn friends, roommates and fellow dropouts. Ma calls Takatsu a “human calculator”, which presumably helps when splitting both rent and profits.

The model is straightforward. Qualifying traders use the company's money to trade perpetual futures in real markets around the clock and keep up to 80% of the profits. Vest takes the rest and does not make money from simulated evaluation fees, so it shares in traders' gains instead of betting against them. “How can we do this with the interests aligned with the user?” Ma said, describing the question the founders started from.

Early numbers

• About 27,000 traders on the platform as of late September.
• Roughly 26% of them had received a cash payout.
• Monthly active traders and trading volume grew more than 300% month over month.
• A team of 22 people.

The market is growing too: Track360 expects retail prop trading revenue to reach $850 million in 2026, up about 45%. Vest plans to spend the new money on a mobile app, more hires and more assets that users can trade around the clock.