Just two months after listing its first venture fund, Robinhood is set to launch its second. There is a company a confidential registration For RVII, a standard regulatory step that allows you to work through the approval process before making the details public.
Uunlike his first fund, which currently owns a stake 10 delayed companies — Airwallex, Boom, Databricks, ElevenLabs, Mercor, OpenAI, Oura, Ramp, Revolut and Stripe — RVII will cast a wider net by investing in growth and early-stage startups. This is a meaningful distinction given that early-stage startups are younger and carry more risk, but also offer the potential for greater returns.
While the fundraising target for RVII has yet to be determined, the company is a blog post. For its first fund, Robinhood wanted to raise $1 billion, but eventually fell through a few hundred million short from that purpose.
Despite the shortfall, the first fund performed strongly. RVI — Robinhood’s first NYSE-traded fund ticker — debuted on the NYSE in early March at $21 a share and has since more than doubled to close at $43.69 on Monday. Market enthusiasm for the AI prospects of the fund’s top startups likely fueled the stock rally.
The provision behind both funds closes a long-standing loophole on 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 kept ordinary investors out of the earliest and most profitable stages of a company’s growth. RVI, and now RVII, is designed to change that by allowing anyone to invest in a personal portfolio of startups through a regular brokerage account.
“You can think of (Robinhood Ventures) as a publicly traded venture capital firm with daily liquidity. There are no accreditation requirements and no porting,” said Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev. interview At The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference last week. Daily liquidity means shares can be bought or sold any day the market is open, unlike traditional VC funds where capital is tied up for years. No carryover means that Robinhood doesn’t take a percentage of investment profits like regular venture capital firms typically do.
Over the past few years, the most valuable AI startups have gone from early bets to companies valued in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and almost all of those valuations have taken place in private markets, out of reach for most investors.
Tenev’s long-term vision goes even further. “The point is that if you’re a company raising a seed round and a Series A round — so just seed capital — retail should be a big part of that round, just like the public markets are now,” Tenev said. said at the conference. “And we need to get these people in on the ground floor so they can really take advantage of this potential appreciation that’s happening more and more in the private markets.”
If this vision comes to fruition, it could fundamentally change how startups raise seed capital, with retail investors finally sitting alongside venture firms, including losing a lot of money in the early stages, when the biggest returns are often made.
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