Robinhood

Robinhood Markets offers commission free trading in stocks, options and crypto, along with retirement accounts, banking, prediction markets and access to private markets through its own funds. It was founded in April 2013 by Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, Stanford classmates who had previously built high frequency trading software, and is headquartered at 85 Willow Road in Menlo Park, California.

Robinhood raised a $3 million seed round led by Index Ventures in December 2013 and a $13 million Series A in September 2014 with Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital. New Enterprise Associates led a $50 million Series B in May 2015. The $110 million Series C in April 2017 valued the company at $1.3 billion, with DST Global, Greenoaks and Thrive Capital participating. DST Global led the $363 million Series D in May 2018 and the $323 million Series E in July 2019. Sequoia Capital led a $280 million Series F in May 2020 at an $8.3 billion valuation, and D1 Capital Partners invested in the Series G; the IPO prospectus records that Robinhood sold $668.3 million of Series G stock at $15.50 per share between August and September 2020. During the GameStop trading surge in January and February 2021, it raised about $3.4 billion in emergency funding from existing investors.

Robinhood priced its IPO at $38.00 per share and began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker HOOD on July 29, 2021, raising about $2.1 billion at a valuation of roughly $32 billion. A portion of the shares was offered to its own customers through its IPO Access feature. Before the offering, the largest outside holders were entities affiliated with Index Ventures (13.0%), New Enterprise Associates (11.4%), Ribbit Capital (9.8%) and DST Global (8.9%). In 2025 Robinhood reported revenue of $4.47 billion and net income of $1.88 billion, and it serves more than 27 million funded customers with $307 billion of platform assets. It is now a member of the S&P 500.

Robinhood shows the full arc of a seed investment in consumer finance. Index Ventures led the first round in 2013 and still owned 13% at the IPO eight years later, alongside Ribbit Capital, which also entered at the Series A. The company's later rounds shifted toward growth investors (DST Global, Sequoia, D1), and the emergency raise in early 2021 shows how a regulated brokerage's capital needs can spike suddenly with trading volume.