Robinhood Plans to Speed Up Debuts for Publicly Traded Funds

Robinhood Plans to Speed Up Debuts for Publicly Traded Funds

Thu, August 13, 2026 at 6:45 PM GMT+3 2 min read

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(Bloomberg) -- Robinhood Markets Inc. is planning to increase how often it debuts publicly traded closed-end funds after unveiling its first two attempts at making private firms more widely available to its retail customers.

The first fund, which holds stakes in large private technology companies, debuted in March, and is now being followed by a second that's set to begin trading Thursday. The second fund focuses on early stage firms coming out of the startup incubator Y Combinator.

"From inception to fund one was less than a year. Now fund two is six months," Robinhood Chief Financial Officer Shiv Verma said in an interview. "I actually think the pace can accelerate, and so we won't say any particular times, but we really feel we're just getting started."

The two funds employ three investment professionals with plans to hire more, according to Sarah Pinto Peyronel, head of Robinhood Ventures and president of its first ventures fund.

The firm, based in Menlo Park, California, began marketing its second fund earlier this month. Rich Aberman, an early-stage investor and former Y Combinator visiting partner, joined Robinhood to manage the fund earlier this year.

Robinhood has committed $20 million across 80 companies on its balance sheet on behalf of the latest early venture fund, Verma said. The goal is to back companies with checks of around $250,000 to $500,000 and diversify the risk across different vintages and groups of Y Combinator investments, Aberman said.

"A lot of them are less than a year old," Aberman said, adding that many of them are not yet generating revenue.

Read More: Robinhood Private Company Fund to Back Y Combinator Startups

Shares of Robinhood's first fund have gained more than 14% since their debut through Wednesday, compared with the S&P 500's 13% increase.

Verma said Chief Executive Officer Vlad Tenev told him his goal is to make Robinhood "the largest venture capital firm in the world" as well as provider of capital.

"This is not just 'Oh, let's do a couple funds and this is great,'" Verma said. "It's 'How can we scale this to give customers access to basically everything in private-asset-class ecosystems?'"