RobinhoodRobinhood’s first fund designed to expand retail investors’ access to private markets has attracted 150,000 retail investors, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev He said Tuesday (May 5).
Speaking in the Wall Street Journal The future of everything Event, Tenev said Robinhood took it Project Fund I Public as a closed-end public fund listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
“You can think of it as a publicly traded venture capital firm with daily liquidity, no accreditation requirements, no carry — so just competitive management fees, no carry,” Tenev said.
Investors in the fund typically pay about 20% of their profits plus a management fee, Tenev said.
Robinhood Ventures Fund I’s portfolio includes “frontier companies” that lie at the boundaries of their industries, including… OpenAI, Data bricks and tape– said Tenev.
Robinhood launched the fund because there are private companies raising capital with valuations in the hundreds of billions, and potentially several companies worth trillions, ahead of an initial public offering (IPO) that allows retail investors to participate.
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The company calls for making it easier for companies to go public, but also wants to give individual investors access to companies that don’t want to go public early.
Robinhood Ventures is the first step in this effort, and the participation of 150,000 retail investors shows it is “quite democratic,” Tenev said.
“It’s also just the beginning,” Tenev said. “The aspiration is, if you’re a company raising a seed round and a Series A round, so it should just be seed capital, and retail should be a big part of that round, as it is now in the public markets, and we should let those people get in on the ground floor so they can actually take advantage of that potential upside that’s increasingly happening in private markets.”
Robinhood announced in September 2025 that it had created a fund designed for expansion Retail investors‘Access to private markets and provided to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to begin the process of consolidating the Fund’s common shares.
Robinhood Ventures Fund announced on April 22 that it had purchased about $75 million in OpenAI common stock. investment “It underscores our core mission of providing everyday investors with access to what we believe are transformative companies shaping the future.”
