Robinhood just ran Wall Street a real-time test on retail demand for private startups, and the first one lasted two months before the stock more than doubled.
Now Robinhood is filing a second one.
The company quietly filed confidential paperwork for RVII, a follow-up venture fund that will trade publicly the same way the first one does, coming just two months after RVI - Robinhood's first publicly traded venture fund - hit the NYSE.
RVI debuted in early March at $21 a share and closed Monday at $43.69.
The fund holds stakes in 10 late-stage AI and tech names: Airwallex, Boom, Databricks, ElevenLabs, Mercor, OpenAI, Oura, Ramp, Revolut, and Stripe. The price ran because the assets inside the fund are some of the most-watched private companies in AI.
RVII will go further - instead of just late-stage names, it will buy growth-stage and early-stage startups, which are younger, riskier, but with bigger potential payoffs if they hit.
If you want to keep tabs on the AI names showing up in funds like this before they go public, Market Briefs breaks them down every morning - plus a free investing masterclass when you sign up.
For decades, the rule was simple: if your net worth was under $1 million or your income was under $200,000, you couldn't invest in private companies.
The biggest gains - the ones happening before a company hits the public market - were locked behind that wall.
RVI and RVII are designed to knock it down, since anyone with a brokerage account can buy in.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev described it as a "publicly traded venture capital firm with daily liquidity. No accreditation requirements and no carry."
In English: shares trade on any market day, and Robinhood doesn't take a slice of profits the way traditional VC firms do.
Tenev told the WSJ Future of Everything conference last week that his real ambition is bigger - he wants retail investors in at the seed and Series A stage, the rounds where the biggest returns happen and the biggest losses too.
The first fund didn't hit its $1 billion target, but Robinhood still raised hundreds of millions and turned it into a stock that doubled in two months.
That's the kind of investor demand that makes Wall Street rewrite its playbook.
The early-stage focus inside RVII also raises the risk profile, since seed-stage and Series A companies fail more often than late-stage ones - so the upside on a winner is bigger, and so is the downside on a loser.
If the second fund draws the same retail demand the first one did, the floodgates open. Every brokerage in America has a reason to launch its own version, and the private market starts looking a lot more like the public one.
RVII is the second draft. The first one worked.
Join 350,000+ investors reading Market Briefs every weekday and grab the 45-minute investing course that comes free when you sign up.
