The Robinhood investment fund’s initial public offering attracted more than 150,000 retail investors, the CEO says

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is touting the success of his new fintech venture, Ventures Fund I, which allows retail investors to invest in private technology companies like Stripe, Oura, Databricks, OpenAI, and others, through a publicly traded fund listed on the New York Stock Exchange. “We had approximately 150,000 retail investors participating in the IPO, so it’s quite democratic,” Tenev noted in an interview at the Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week.

The fund, which was launched in March, comes at a time when the term “unicorn,” which once referred to the rare billion-dollar startup, is becoming obsolete. When AI modeling providers like OpenAI and Anthropic raise capital at valuations ranging from $850 billion to $900 billion, another word is needed besides “unicorn.”

“We call them frontier companies,” Tenev said, explaining how Robinhood sets these larger, private companies apart from other startups.

“There are private companies raising capital at valuations in the hundreds of billions. You may see many private companies reaching trillions of dollars. [in valuation] “Pre-IPO – before retail investors can participate.”

Robinhood’s seed fund has exposure to several tech companies that have not yet gone public, including 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 market access for retail investors.

Initially, the company did this through commission-free trades, which significantly increased retail participation in the public markets. She now sees investing in large private companies as the next step.

“You can think about [the new fund] As a publicly traded venture capital company with daily liquidity. “There are no accreditation requirements and no load,” Tenev said in the interview. “So just a competitive management fee, no load – which, for those of you familiar with venture capital, typically, when you invest in a fund as a limited company, you pay a management fee, but there is also a carrying fee typically around 20%, which means 20% of your profits go to the fund manager.

Tenev believes that given the size of these companies, retail investors should be able to get in before the IPO — especially given the number of companies choosing to wait until they go public.

“The aspiration is, if you’re a company raising a seed round and a Series A round — so, just seed capital — retail should be a big part of that round, just like it is now in the public markets,” Tenev said. “And we have to let these people in on the ground floor, so they can actually take advantage of this potential upside that is increasingly happening in private markets,” he added.