Vest Raises $5M from Wall Street to Build the Universal Risk Engine

New York, United States, March 11th, 2025, Chainwire

Vest Labs, a financial infrastructure company pioneering real-time risk pricing, has secured a record $5 million seed funding to accelerate the development of cutting-edge financial infrastructure.

With investments stemming from leading financial and crypto investors, including Jane Street, Amber Group, Selini Capital, QCP Capital, and Big Brain Holdings, Vest aims to replace opaque, trust-based systems with real-time, verifiable risk pricing, ensuring greater transparency and efficiency in financial markets.

Traditional financial markets suffer from inefficiencies due to fragmented risk assessment, where each institution, exchange, and counterparty operates in isolation. This siloed approach results in capital misallocation, solvency risks, and systemic inefficiencies that cost institutions billions annually. Vest’s universal risk engine addresses these challenges by dynamically pricing risk across markets and financial products in real-time.

As a neutral and verifiable intermediary, Vest will enable participants to share risk data without exposing proprietary information, leading to greater capital efficiency, improved liquidity provisioning, fairer pricing, and more accurate risk assessments across lending, trading, and credit markets.

Justin Ma, CEO of Vest Labs, commented, “Current financial markets rely on opaque, trust-based systems that create large capital inefficiencies, misprice risk, and lead to systemic failures. At Vest, we’re building infrastructure that replaces trust with truth - where universal risk is priced in real-time, liquidity is allocated efficiently, and solvency is verifiable. This funding is a testament to the need for a new standard in risk assessment, and we are excited to lead that transformation.”

As a first proof of concept, Vest is launching a perpetual futures exchange to demonstrate how universal risk assessment enables a fair, predictable, and liquid trading environment. Unlike traditional exchanges that rely on market makers optimizing for profit, Vest uses blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs to enforce a neutral pricing mechanism. This ensures that prices are dynamically adjusted to promote stable execution and liquidity, rather than extract value from traders - a constraint that can be transparently verified at all times.

Since its inception, Vest Exchange has maintained a median spread and slippage four times lower than other decentralized exchanges, saving early traders hundreds of thousands of dollars. The newly secured funding will be used to refine the exchange’s risk engine and expand its product offerings to institutional players seeking to move beyond legacy risk infrastructure.

To drive further adoption, Vest Exchange is launching a points program to reward active traders and early adopters while reinforcing liquidity growth and market depth. Further details are to be announced on their X account later today.

About Vest

Vest is a quantitative research firm developing financial infrastructure that enables real-time, universal risk pricing. It is built by a team of experts and advisors from leading firms such as Robinhood, Goldman Sachs, AQR, Point72, Deutsche Bank, and Tower Research. Their investors include Jane Street, Selini Capital, Big Brain Holdings, QCP Capital, Amber Group, and executives from Citadel, UBS, and HRT.

Users can learn more at vest.xyz or contact press@vest.xyz.