Robinhood announced Monday it has filed an application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a new publicly traded fund that will hold shares of startups.
The idea behind the “Robinhood Ventures Fund I” is to allow every retail investor access to make money on the hottest startups before they go public.
While the current version of the application is public, Robinhood hasn’t filled in the fine-print yet. This means we don’t know how many shares it plans to sell, nor other details like the management fee it plans to charge. It’s also unclear which startups it hopes this fund will eventually hold. The paperwork says it “expects” to invest in aerospace and defense, AI, fintech, robotics as well as software for consumers and enterprises.
Robinhood’s big pitch is that retail investors are being left out of the gains that are amassed by startup investors like VCs. That’s true to an extent. “Accredited investors” — or those with a net worth large enough to handle riskier investments — already have a variety of ways of buying equity in startups, such as with venture firms like OurCrowd.
Retail investors that are not rich enough to be accredited have more limited options. There are funds similar to what Robinhood has proposed, including Cathy Wood’s ARK Venture Fund, a mutual fund which holds stakes in companies like Anthropic, Databricks, OpenAI, SpaceX, and others.
Robinhood’s last such effort was controversial. The trading company launched what it called private “tokenized” stocks in the EU earlier this year, implying these tokens gave retail investors the ability to make money from shares of private companies like OpenAI. However, OpenAI denounced the product, pointing out that buyers of these tokens were not actually buying OpenAI stock — tokenized or otherwise. They were simply buying tokens pegged to prices of a private company’s stock.
This new closed-end “Ventures Fund I” is a more classic, mutual fund-style, approach. As to when Robinhood’s new fund will be available we don’t know that either yet. Robinhood, which is in a quiet period, declined to comment.
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