Robinhood’s venture fund IPO attracted 150,000+ retail investors, CEO says
Key takeaways
- 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in March, arrives at a time when the term unicorn, which once referred to the rare billion-dollar startup, has become outdated.
- We call them frontier companies, said Tenev, explaining how Robinhood differentiates these larger, private companies from other startups.
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, Open AI, 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in March, arrives at a time when the term unicorn, which once referred to the rare billion-dollar startup, has become outdated.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.