Just two months after listing its first venture fund on the stock market, Robinhood is preparing to launch its second fund. The company is This is a standard regulatory procedure that allows details to go through an approval process before being made public.
UIt differs from its first fund, which currently holds stakes in 10 late-stage companies: Airwallex, Boom, Databricks, Eleven Labs, Mercor, OpenAI, Oura, Ramp, Revolut, and Stripe. — RVII casts a wider net to invest in growth-stage and early-stage startups. This is a meaningful distinction, given that early-stage startups are younger and carry more risk, while potentially offering greater returns.
A fundraising goal for RVII has not yet been set, the company said in a blog post. Robinhood aimed to raise $1 billion for its first fund, but ultimately fell short of its goal by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Despite the shortfall, the first fund performed well. RVI — the ticker for Robinhood’s first fund traded on the New York Stock Exchange — debuted on the NYSE in early March at $21 per share and has more than doubled since then, closing Monday at $43.69. Market enthusiasm for the AI prospects of the fund’s underlying startups likely fueled the stock’s rise.
The premise behind both funds is to address a long-standing gap in who can invest in startups. Under federal rules, only “accredited” investors – those with a net worth of more than $1 million or annual income of more than $200,000 – can put money into private companies. This has historically excluded retail investors from the earliest and most profitable stages of a company’s growth. RVI and now RVII are designed to change this, allowing anyone to invest in a portfolio of private startups through a regular brokerage account.
“You can think of[Robinhood Ventures]as a publicly traded venture capital firm with day-to-day liquidity. No certification requirements, no carry,” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in an interview at the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference last week. Daily liquidity means you can buy and sell stocks whenever the market is open, unlike traditional VC funds where your capital is locked up for years. No-carry means that Robinhood does not receive a portion of investment returns, as traditional venture companies typically do.
Over the past few years, the most valuable AI startups have grown from initial investments to companies worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, with almost all of that appreciation occurring in private markets that are out of reach for most investors.
Tenev’s long-term vision goes even further. “The aspiration is that if you’re a company raising a seed round and a Series A round, so just the initial capital, retail should be a big part of that round, just like in the public markets today,” Tenev said at the conference. “And we should get those people on the ground floor so they can actually benefit from the potential price increases that are happening more and more in the private market.”
If this vision takes hold, it could fundamentally change the way startups raise early funding, eventually putting private investors on par with venture businesses, including early rounds that often yield the most returns, but at the cost of just as much money being lost.
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