Riding an AI rally, Robinhood preps second retail venture IPO

Just two months after listing its first venture fund on the stock market, Robinhood is preparing to launch a second. The company has filed a confidential registration for RVII, a standard regulatory step that allows it to work through the approval process before making details public.

Unlike its first fund, which currently holds stakes in 10 late-stage companies — Airwallex, Boom, Databricks, ElevenLabs, Mercor, OpenAI, Oura, Ramp, Revolut, and Stripe — RVII will cast a wider net, investing in growth-stage and early-stage startups. It’s a meaningful distinction, given that early-stage startups are younger and carry more risk but also offer the potential for greater returns.

The fundraising target for RVII has not yet been set, the company said in a blog post. For its inaugural fund, Robinhood sought to raise $1 billion but ultimately fell several hundred million short of that goal.

Despite the shortfall, the first fund has performed strongly. RVI — the ticker for Robinhood’s first fund, which trades on the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) — debuted on the NYSE at $21 a share in early March and has since more than doubled, closing on Monday at $43.69. Market enthusiasm for the AI prospects of the fund’s underlying startups has likely fueled the stock’s rise.

The premise behind both funds addresses a long-standing gap in who gets to invest in startups. Under federal rules, only “accredited” investors — those with a net worth exceeding $1 million or annual income above $200,000 — can put money into private companies. That has historically locked ordinary investors out of the earliest and most lucrative stages of a company’s growth. RVI and now RVII, are designed to change that, letting anyone 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 carry,” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in an 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 locked up for years. No carry means Robinhood doesn’t take a percentage of investment profits, as conventional venture firms typically do.

Over the past few years, the most valuable AI startups have gone from early bets to companies worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and almost all of that appreciation has happened in the private markets, out of reach for most investors.

Tenev’s longer-term vision goes further still. “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 at the conference. “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.”

If that vision takes hold, it could fundamentally change how startups raise their earliest capital, with retail investors eventually sitting alongside venture firms, including in the earliest rounds, where the biggest returns are often made, and a whole lot of money is lost as well.