Exclusive: Portal Ventures-backed Vest raises $13 million to build a proprietary trading firm that shares traders’ profits
Source: Fortune ·
Senior executives at Citadel Securities, BlackRock, and KKR also contributed to the round.
From the source
The booming retail proprietary trading industry can make money even when its traders don’t. Rather than relying on live market returns, many of these firms charge fees for simulated trading accounts, letting them profit whether users succeed or fail. New York-based startup Vest Labs says it’s taking a different approach by letting qualifying traders use company money to trade perpetual futures in real markets around the clock. Vest shares in their profits rather than betting against them. Cofounded by friends and University of Pennsylvania dropouts Justin Ma, Rikuya Takatsu, and Maximilian Tsiang, Vest announced Wednesday that it had raised a $13 million seed round, which closed in July. In an interview with Fortune, the founders explained that their model lets traders keep up to 80% of their profits, with the company taking the rest—an arrangement that gives Vest a stake in their success. “Instead of trying to improve iteratively on the prop firm business, we… just said, ‘How can we…