Robinhood (HOOD) is shifting deeper into personal markets with a brand new enterprise capital fund designed to provide on a regular basis buyers entry to firms earlier than they go public.
The corporate has filed with the Securities and Change Fee (SEC) an preliminary registration assertion to launch Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI), a closed-end funding automobile that goals to purchase stakes in personal firms which can be leaders of their industries.
The fund, managed by a newly fashioned subsidiary known as Robinhood Ventures, can be traded on the New York Inventory Change, pending regulatory approval.
Robinhood confronted criticism earlier this 12 months after it introduced that it was providing customers within the European Union entry to personal fairness tokens.
The corporate opened entry to those tokens via tokenized shares in OpenAI and SpaceX, whereas additionally launching its personal layer-2 blockchain community for customers within the European Union to have entry to tokenized publicly traded U.S. shares.
On the time, the corporate was pressured to elucidate that its personal fairness tokens had been held by a particular objective automobile, after OpenAI warned that the tokens didn’t symbolize fairness within the agency. Nonetheless, the corporate is pushing ahead with providing personal fairness entry to retail buyers.
“For many years, rich individuals and establishments have invested in personal firms whereas retail buyers have been unfairly locked out,” Robinhood Chairman and CEO Vlad Tenev mentioned.
Robinhood identified that the variety of public firms within the U.S. has dropped by almost half since 2000, whereas the personal market has ballooned to over $10 trillion in estimated worth, in response to Federal Reserve information.
If accepted, Robinhood Ventures Fund I’d put money into a small basket of personal firms throughout numerous industries and maintain them via IPO and past. Shares can be in the stores and promote via conventional brokerages.
Robinhood shares are down 1.4% in at this time’s buying and selling session to $113.39.