- Commission-free stock trading app Robinhood is reportedly raising $200 million in funding at a valuation of between $7 billion and $8 billion
- This round of funding is coming from existing investors
- The talks are still ongoing and might lead to Robinhood hitting a valuation as high as $10 billion
Robinhood is an app that allows you to invest in stocks, options, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies without having to pay commissions. According to Bloomberg’s sources, Robinhood Markets is getting closer to securing at least $200 million in funding at a valuation of between $7 billion and $8 billion.
This round of funding is reportedly coming from existing investors. But the investors involved in this round asked not to be identified since the details are private.
However, the funding talks are still ongoing. And the valuation could hit as high as $10 billion in a subsequent round. These numbers are all subject to change until a deal is closed. The last time that Robinhood raised funding was in the middle of 2018 at a valuation of more than $5.6 billion.
Robinhood — which was founded by Vlad Tenev and Baiju Prafulkumar Bhatt — is also in the process of relaunching a cash management service with 3% interest. The company had to pull back the cash management service due to the way it was marketed and how it would be insured.
Earlier this year, Robinhood had launched new premium features with the Gold subscription service. For $5 per month, eligible members would have access to larger instant deposits and $1,000 of interest-free deposits for users who invest with margin. Plus Gold subscribers would have access to Nasdaq Level 2 market data and over 1,500 research reports from analysts at Morningstar.
Robinhood has raised over $500 million in funding so far. And some of its existing investors include Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, DST Global, ICONIQ Capital, CapitalG (Google’s growth equity investment fund).
Currently, Robinhood has over 6 million registered users. And Robinhood helped those users save over $1 billion in fees as of early 2018. There were reports that Robinhood was planning to go public this year, but this round of funding would likely mean that an IPO would likely happen in 2020 instead.
