Robinhood Prepares to Launch Second Venture Fund RVII with Broader Investment Strategy
By admin | May 12, 2026 | 3 min read
Just two months after bringing its first venture fund to the stock market, Robinhood is gearing up for a second. The company has submitted a confidential registration for RVII, a standard regulatory move that lets it navigate the approval process before disclosing specifics. While the initial fund currently holds stakes in 10 late-stage companies—Airwallex, Boom, Databricks, ElevenLabs, Mercor, OpenAI, Oura, Ramp, Revolut, and Stripe—RVII will take a broader approach, investing in both growth-stage and early-stage startups. This is a notable shift, as early-stage companies are younger and riskier but can offer higher potential returns.
The fundraising target for RVII hasn’t been set yet, according to a company blog post. For its first fund, Robinhood aimed to raise $1 billion but ultimately fell a few hundred million short of that goal. Despite the shortfall, the initial fund has performed strongly. RVI—the ticker for Robinhood’s first fund, traded on the New York Stock Exchange—debuted at $21 per share in early March and has since more than doubled, closing on Monday at $43.69. Market excitement about the AI prospects of the fund’s underlying startups has likely driven the stock’s rise.
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The concept behind both funds tackles a long-standing gap in startup investing. Under federal rules, only “accredited” investors—those with a net worth over $1 million or annual income above $200,000—can invest in private companies. This has historically shut out everyday investors from the earliest and most lucrative stages of a company’s growth. RVI and now RVII aim to change that, allowing anyone to invest in a portfolio of private startups through a regular brokerage account.
“You can think of [Robinhood Ventures] as a publicly traded venture capital firm with daily liquidity. No accreditation requirements and no carry,” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference last week. Daily liquidity means shares can be bought or sold any day the market is open, unlike traditional VC funds where capital is locked up for years. No carry means Robinhood doesn’t take a percentage of investment profits, as conventional venture firms typically do.
In recent years, the most valuable AI startups have evolved from early bets into companies worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and nearly all of that growth has occurred in private markets, out of reach for most investors. Tenev’s longer-term vision goes even further. “The aspiration is, if you’re a company raising a seed round and a Series A round—so, just first capital—retail should be a big chunk of that round, much like it now is in the public markets,” Tenev said at the conference. “And we should let those people in at the ground floor, so that they can actually benefit from this potential appreciation that’s increasingly happening in the private markets.”
If that vision takes hold, it could fundamentally reshape how startups raise their earliest capital, with retail investors eventually sitting alongside venture firms, including in the earliest rounds where the biggest returns are often made—and a whole lot of money is lost, as well.
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