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in March, arrives at a time when the term “unicorn,” which once referred to the rare billion-dollar startup, has become outdated.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.
Initially, the company did this through its zero-commission trades, which significantly increased retail participation in the public markets. Now it sees investing in large, private companies as the next step.
“You can think of [the new fund] as a publicly traded venture capital firm with daily liquidity. No accreditation requirements and no carry,” Tenev said in the interview. “So just a competitive management fee, no carry — which, for those of you familiar with venture capital, typically, when you invest in a fund as an LP, you pay a management fee, but there’s also a carry of typically around 20%, which means 20% of your profits go to the fund manager.”
Tenev believes that, due to the size of these companies, retail investors should be able to get in earlier than the IPO — especially given how many companies are choosing to wait to go public.
“The aspiration is, if you’re a company raising a seed round and a Series A round — so, just first capital — retail should be a big chunk of that round, much like it now is in the public markets,” Tenev said. “And we should let those people in at the ground floor, so that they can actually benefit from this potential appreciation that’s increasingly happening in the private markets,” he added.
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