Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev touts the success of the new fintech Ventures Fund Iwhich allows retail investors to invest in private technology companies such as Stripe, Oura, Databricks, OpenAI and others through an exchange-traded fund listed on the NYSE. “We had over 150,000 retail investors participate in the IPO, so it’s quite democratized,” Tenev noted in a interview at the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference this week.
The fund, which launched in March, it arrives at a time when the term “unicorn,” which once referred to the rare billion-dollar startup, has become obsolete. When AI model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic are raising capital at $850+ billion to $900 billion valuations, a word other than “unicorn” is needed.
“We call them frontier companies,” Tenev said, 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, a lot of private companies going 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 the latest OpenAI, which unites 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 zero-fee trading, which significantly increased retail participation in the public markets. Now he sees investing in large, private companies as the next step.
“You can think [the new fund] as a listed venture capital company with daily liquidity. No accreditation requirements and no transfer,” Tenev said in the interview. “So just a competitive management fee, no carryover — 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 about a 20% carryover, which means 20% of your profits go to the fund manager.
Tenev believes that because of the size of these companies, retail investors should be able to get in earlier than the IPO – especially given the number of companies choosing to wait to go public.
“The aspiration is, if you’re a company that’s raising a seed round and a Series A round — so just the first capital — retail should be a big part of that round, just like the public markets are now,” Tenev said. “And we’re going to have to let those people in on the ground floor so they can really take advantage of that potential appreciation that’s happening more and more in the private markets,” he added.
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