Just two months after listing its first venture capital fund, Robinhood is preparing to launch a second. The company has has filed a confidential registration for RVII, a standard regulatory step that allows it to go through the approval process before making details public.
ulike its first fund, which currently holds stakes in 10 companies in the development phase — Airwallex, Boom, Databricks, ElevenLabs, Mercor, OpenAI, Oura, Ramp, Revolut and Stripe — RVII will expand its network by investing in growth-stage and early-stage startups. This is a significant distinction, given that early-stage startups are younger and carry more risk, but also offer higher return potential.
The fundraising goal for RVII has not yet been set, the company said in a statement. blog post. For its inaugural fund, Robinhood sought to raise $1 billion but ultimately failed several hundred million missing of this objective.
Despite the deficit, the first fund recorded solid performance. RVI – the symbol for Robinhood’s first fund, traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) – debuted on the NYSE at $21 per share in early March and has since more than doubled, closing Monday at $43.69. Market enthusiasm for the AI prospects of the startups underlying the fund likely fueled the stock’s rise.
The principle behind both funds addresses 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 an annual income of more than $200,000 — can invest in private companies. This has historically excluded ordinary investors from the earliest and most lucrative stages of a company’s growth. RVI and now RVII are designed to change that, by 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 daily liquidity. No accreditation requirements and no deferrals,” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in a statement. interview at the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference last week. Daily liquidity means that shares can be bought or sold on any day the market is open, unlike traditional venture capital funds, where capital is locked in for years. The lack of carry means that Robinhood does not take a percentage of investment profits, as conventional venture capital firms typically do.
Over the past few years, the most valuable AI startups have grown from early bets to companies worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and almost all of that appreciation has occurred in private markets, beyond the reach of most investors.
Tenev’s long-term vision goes even further. “The goal is that if you’re a company that’s doing a seed round and a Series A round – so, just the first capital – retail should be a big part of that round, much like it is in the public markets now,” Tenev said at the conference. “And we should let those people get in on the ground floor, so they can actually benefit from this potential appreciation that is happening more and more in private markets.”
If this vision comes to fruition, it could fundamentally change the way startups raise their first capital, with retail investors eventually sitting alongside VCs, including in early rounds, where the biggest returns are often earned and a lot of money is also lost.
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Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Before joining TechCrunch, she wrote about venture capital for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned her CFA designation.
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