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

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev touts success New financial technology Project Fund Iwhich allows individual investors to invest in private technology companies such as 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 is quite democratic,” Tenev noted in an interview. interview At the Wall Street Journal’s “The Future of Everything” conference this week.

The box that Fired 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 $850+ billion to 900 billion dollarsAnother word besides “unicorn” is needed.

“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,” he said. “You will probably see many private companies reach trillions (in valuation) before the IPO — before retail investors can participate.”

Robinhood’s seed fund has exposure to several technology companies that have not yet gone public, Recently 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 of (the new fund) as a publicly traded venture capital firm with daily liquidity. There are no certification requirements and no carry,” Tenev said in the interview. “So, just a competitive management fee, no carry – 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’s also a carry 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.