Just two months after listing its first venture fund on the stock market, Robinhood is preparing to launch its second venture fund. The company We have submitted a confidential registration for RVII, a standard regulatory step that allows us to proceed through the approval process before details are made public.
youThe first fund currently holds stakes in 10 late-stage companies, including Airwallex, Boom, Databricks, ElevenLabs, Mercor, OpenAI, Oura, Ramp, Revolut and Stripe. — RVII will invest in a broader range of investments in growth-stage and early-stage startups. This is a meaningful difference, considering that early-stage startups are younger and carry more risk, but also offer the potential for greater returns.
RVII’s fundraising goal has not yet been set, the company said in a blog post. For its founding fund, Robinhood sought to raise $1 billion, but ultimately fell hundreds of millions of dollars short of its goal.
Despite its shortcomings, the first fund performed strongly. RVI, the ticker of Robinhood’s first fund traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), launched on the NYSE in early March at $21 per share and has since more than doubled, closing at $43.69 on Monday. Market enthusiasm for the AI prospects of the fund’s underlying startups likely fueled the share price rally.
The premise of both funds addresses a long-standing gap in who will invest in startups. Federal regulations state that only “accredited” investors with a net worth exceeding $1 million or annual income exceeding $200,000 can invest money in private companies. This has historically prevented retail investors from accessing the earliest and most profitable stages of a company’s growth. RVI and now RVII are designed to change this and allow anyone to invest in private startup portfolios through a regular brokerage account.
“You can think of (Robinhood Ventures) as a publicly traded venture capital firm with daily liquidity. No certification requirements, no carry,” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in an interview last week at the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference. Daily liquidity means that shares can be bought and sold any day the market is open, unlike traditional VC funds where capital is locked up for years. No carry means Robinhood doesn’t take a portion of your investment profits like traditional venture firms typically do.
Over the past few years, the most valuable AI startups have moved from early-stage investments to companies worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and almost all of that appreciation has occurred in private markets inaccessible to most investors.
Tenev’s long-term vision went further. “If you’re a company pursuing a seed round and a Series A round, it’s only the first round of capital, but the bottom line is that retail has to be a big part of that round, just like it is in the public markets now,” Tenev said at the conference. “And we need to get those people in on the ground floor so they can actually benefit from these potential audits that are happening more and more in the private markets.”
If that vision takes hold, it could fundamentally change the way startups raise seed capital, with retail investors eventually sitting alongside ventures. Even early rounds, which often yield the biggest returns, also result in a lot of money being lost.
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