Justin Ma

In the summer of 2020, Ma was a sophomore in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences. With students taking classes remotely, he felt bored and wanted to work on a project to help classmates have a more enjoyable time in quarantine, so he reached out to a fellow student and, working with several students from Penn and other schools, spent two and a half months developing Berri, a Tinder-like app for students to match anonymously and make friends; its co-founders included Rikuya Takatsu, who would later co-found Vest with him. Berri launched on September 14, 2020, initially open only to Penn students and accessible only through a web browser; from August 29, when pre-launch profile creation opened, to the day after launch, it had garnered more than 1,000 profiles.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

On April 6, 2021, Berri expanded to all Ivy League schools; it had already launched at Carnegie Mellon University, Drexel University, and the University of Maryland, with nearly 3,000 total users and 18,000 matches.⁠[2][2]

Ma studied finance and philosophy at Penn, during which time he became interested in crypto derivatives. During his junior year in 2021, he and his close friends and roommates Rikuya Takatsu and Maximilian Tsiang began to study how exchanges worked, coming to believe that the pricing systems used by some early decentralized trading platforms were mathematically flawed. That year he sold Berri and dropped out; by his account, Berri reached 100,000 users and was sold within months.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

After dropping out, Ma used the proceeds from Berri’s sale to begin high-frequency crypto trading and lay the groundwork for Vest: he first set up an open-source research forum where he published papers on exchange mechanics and trade execution, and the three founders spent months living together in a house designing algorithms to improve exchanges. He co-founded Vest Labs with Takatsu and Tsiang and serves as its chief executive officer.⁠[3][3][3][3]

At a Penn alumni event during the Stanford Blockchain Conference in 2024, Ma met Catrina WangCatrina WangCatrina Wang is a crypto venture capitalist and a general partner at Portal Ventures, a venture firm focused on leading pre-seed rounds in blockchain projects.Open the full entry, a fellow alum and general partner at Portal VenturesPortal VenturesPortal Ventures is a US venture capital firm founded by Evan Fisher in 2022 that focuses on the pre-seed stage in blockchain and crypto, with its main strategy being to lead first checks before product-market fit; in 2026, it led the $13 million seed round of the retail proprietary trading startup Vest Labs.Open the full entry, and pitched Vest to her for the first time; the conversation that followed ultimately led to Portal Ventures leading a Vest funding round.⁠[3][3]

On March 11, 2025, Vest Labs announced a $5 million seed funding round from investors including Jane Street and Amber Group, and launched a perpetual futures exchange as the first proof of concept for its risk-pricing vision. Ma said at the time that current financial markets rely on opaque, trust-based systems that create capital inefficiencies, misprice risk, and lead to systemic failures, and that Vest was building infrastructure that “replaces trust with truth.”⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

On October 7, 2026, Vest announced a $13 million funding round led by Portal Ventures, which had closed in July. Ma said the team did not try to improve iteratively on the traditional prop firm model but instead designed the business around how to align the company’s interests with those of its users; he said most prop firms make money when their traders lose, so their rules are built to make traders fail, whereas Vest does not profit from traders’ losses. He also said he believes perpetual futures are the most trader-friendly way to trade with leverage, and that futures and options traders will move onto them.⁠[3][3][3][5][5][5]