Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is highlighting the success of the fintech’s new Ventures Fund I, enabling retail investors to invest in private tech firms like Stripe, Oura, Databricks, and OpenAI through a publicly traded fund on the NYSE. “We had something like over 150,000 retail investors participate in the IPO, so it’s quite democratized,” said Tenev at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference.
The fund, launched in March, arrives as the term “unicorn” becomes outdated, with AI model providers like OpenAI raising capital at valuations of $850+ billion to $900 billion. “We call them frontier companies,” said Tenev, differentiating these larger private companies from other startups.
“There are private companies raising capital at valuations in the high hundreds of billions. You’re going to see multiple private companies getting into the trillions before the IPO — before retail investors can participate,” he said. Robinhood’s fund includes tech companies that have yet to go public, including OpenAI, Mercor, Ramp, Airwallex, and Boom.
Tenev sees the fund as part of Robinhood’s mission to democratize market access for retail investors, initially achieved through zero-commission trades, and now 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, with no accreditation requirements and no carry,” Tenev noted. He believes that retail investors should have earlier access than the IPO stage, especially as companies delay going public.
“The aspiration is, if you’re a company raising a seed round and a Series A round, retail should be a big chunk of that round, much like it is in public markets,” Tenev said. “We should let those people in at the ground floor so they can benefit from potential appreciation in the private markets.”