Robinhood opened the order window on Monday for Robinhood Ventures Fund II, a closed-end fund that can give retail traders publicity to seed-stage startups from the Y Combinator ecosystem,at an anticipated $25 per share.
The fund extends Robinhood’s private-markets push from late-stage names like OpenAI into the riskiest finish of enterprise capital — seed-stage corporations, most of which fail — packaged as an exchange-listed product with no funding minimums or accreditation necessities. It’s the second such automobile Robinhood has dropped at market this yr, after Robinhood Ventures Fund I listed on the New York Inventory Trade in March.
The providing totals 8 million shares — 7.6 million bought by the fund and 400,000 by Robinhood Markets — for a elevate of about $200 million on the anticipated value, with underwriters holding a 30-day choice to purchase 1.2 million extra. Robinhood clients can request shares by way of the app till the order window closes on Aug. 12, and the fund expects to checklist on the NYSE beneath the ticker RVII on Aug. 13 with positions in 80 non-public corporations at launch. Goldman Sachs is lead bookrunner, joined by Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, UBS and Wells Fargo.
“The subsequent technology of promising startups is being constructed in the present day,” mentioned Sarah Pinto, head of Robinhood Ventures. “With Robinhood Ventures Fund II, retail traders not have to attend till an organization’s IPO to be a part of an early progress journey.”
The Y Combinator Wager
RVII will put money into corporations which can be present or former Y Combinator members, or whose founders went by way of the accelerator’s packages. Y Combinator has funded greater than 5,000 corporations since 2005 with a mixed worth above $1.3 trillion, together with greater than 100 unicorns, in line with the providing announcement. Robinhood’s disclosures notice that Y Combinator doesn’t sponsor or endorse the fund.
“As Robinhood Ventures scales, our mission is for it to change into the norm that retail is represented in your seed or Collection A cap desk,” mentioned Wealthy Aberman, the fund’s portfolio supervisor.
The construction is a enterprise improvement firm, a closed-end fund regulated beneath the Funding Firm Act of 1940,managed by Robinhood Ventures DE, an SEC-registered adviser owned by Robinhood Markets. Traders pay a 2% annual administration payment plus a 20% incentive payment on realized positive factors, with whole annual bills estimated at 4.18%. Robinhood’s personal supplies name the funding “speculative,” warn of a “substantial danger of loss,” and notice shareholders haven’t any redemption rights — shares can solely be bought on the open market, the place they might commerce beneath the worth of the fund’s holdings.
Fund I’s $658 Million Begin
Robinhood Ventures Fund I priced its IPO at $25 per share on March 6for a fund dimension of $658.4 million, focusing on later-stage non-public corporations. In April itbought about $75 million of OpenAI widespread inventory, and its portfolio contains Stripe, Databricks, Revolut, Ramp, ElevenLabs, Airwallex, Increase, Mercor and Oura.
The enterprise funds run alongside Robinhood’s crypto-based path to the identical demand. The corporate gave away tokenized OpenAI and SpaceX publicity to European customers final yr, drawing an objection from OpenAI, which mentioned it had not authorised any switch of its fairness. Robinhood has since launched its personal blockchain with tokenized shares, whereas the enterprise funds route private-market publicity by way of a registered wrapper as an alternative.
