Robinhood’s venture fund IPO attracted 150,000+ retail investors, CEO says

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is touting the success of the fintech’s new Ventures Fund I , which allows retail investors to invest in private tech companies like Stripe, Oura, Databricks, OpenAI, and others, through a publicly-traded fund listed on the NYSE. “We had something like over 150,000 retail investors participate in the IPO, so it’s quite democratized,” noted Tenev, in an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week. The fund, which launched in March, arrives at a time when the term “unicorn,” which once referred to the rare billion-dollar startup, has become outdated. When AI model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic are raising capital at valuations of $850+ billion to $900 billion , another word besides “unicorn” is needed. “We call them frontier companies,” said Tenev, explaining how Robinhood differentiates these larger, private companies from other startups. “There are private companies that are raising capital at valuations in the high hundreds of billions. You’re going to see, perhaps, multiple private companies getting into the trillions [in valuation] before the IPO — before retail investors can participate,” he said. Robinhood’s initial fund has exposure to many tech companies that have yet to go public, including most recently OpenAI, which joins Mercor, Ramp, Airwallex, Boom, and others. Tenev believes the new fund makes sense as part of Robinhood’s broader mission to democratize access to markets for retail investors. …