Overview

Robinhood Markets, Inc. is an American financial services company based in Menlo Park, California. It provides an electronic trading platform that facilitates trades of stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), options, index options, futures contracts, event contracts on prediction markets, and cryptocurrency. It also offers cryptocurrency wallets, wealth management, credit cards and other banking services, some in partnership with banks insured by the FDIC, and operates a venture capital arm as well as an independent media subsidiary, Sherwood.News.

The company has more than 27 million funded customers and $307 billion total platform assets. Its platform is available in the U.S., the UK, and, for trading cryptocurrency and tokenized stocks and ETFs, in the European Union. Bitstamp, its cryptocurrency exchange, holds licenses in Singapore, Luxembourg, the UK, Slovenia and the U.S.

The company does not allow trading in mutual funds, preferred stocks, bonds, some high-risk penny stocks, and new positions in options on their expiration dates in the last 30 minutes of the trading day.

2013-2019: Foundation, options and cryptocurrency trading

Robinhood was founded in April 2013 by Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, two former Stanford classmates who had previously built high-frequency trading platforms for financial institutions in New York City. The company is named after Robin Hood, based on its self-stated mission to "democratize finance for all". Tenev and Bhatt served as co-CEOs from 2013 to 2020, when Tenev became the sole CEO and Bhatt became chief creative officer.

In December 2013, Robinhood closed its seed funding round, securing $3 million in an investment led by Index Ventures, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Rothenberg Ventures, Tim Draper, and Howard Lindzon. The founders presented the mobile app at LA Hacks in April 2014 and launched a beta release in December on the Apple App Store. That September, Robinhood raised $13 million in a Series A round, with returning investors Index Ventures and Howard Lindzon, as well as new investors Ribbit Capital, Aaron Levie, Dave Morin, Jared Leto, Snoop Dogg, and Nas.

The mobile app was launched officially in March 2015. In May 2015, the company raised $50 million in a Series B round led by New Enterprise Associates.

2020-2021: Increased usage and Game Stop short squeeze

In the second quarter of 2020, during the 2020 stock market crash, compared to the first quarter of 2020, trading volumes increased 139%, more than any other major brokerage.

In May 2020, Robinhood raised $280 million in a Series F venture funding round led by Sequoia Capital at a pre-money valuation of $8.3 billion. Robinhood began offering additional guidance and requiring additional criteria and education for customers seeking authorization to trade options after a University of Nebraska–Lincoln student died by suicide in June 2020 after seeing a six-figure negative cash balance on his account.

In August 2020, the company announced a $200 million Series G funding round from a new investor, D1 Capital Partners.

2021-2024: Initial public offering

In January 2021, Robinhood raised $3.4 billion in capital during the "meme stock" frenzy which exceeded the total amount of funding raised in the company's history.

In late June 2021, Robinhood was fined $57 million by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) related to the March 2020 outages and was ordered to pay restitution to affected clients in the largest penalty ever issued by the agency. In 2022, the company agreed to pay $9.9 million to settle class action lawsuits regarding trading losses due to the outages.

The company went public via an initial public offering on the Nasdaq on July 29, 2021 under the ticker HOOD, raising approximately $2.1 billion and valuing Robinhood at about $32 billion. In August 2021, Robinhood completed the $140 million acquisition of Say Technologies, a company that helps shareholders vote proxies and ask questions of management.

2024-present: Product and international expansion

In March 2024, Robinhood acquired Marex FCM, a broker of futures contracts. Robinhood also expanded its services to the United Kingdom. The following month, Robinhood launched its "Sherwood News" website and a rebrand of its financial newsletter Snacks. In March 2024, the company launched the Robinhood Gold credit card. In July 2024, Robinhood acquired Pluto Capital, an AI-powered investment research platform. In October 2024, Robinhood launched Legend, a desktop trading platform.

In August 2024, Robinhood's crypto unit paid $3.9 million and instituted changes to settle claims by the State of California that, between 2018 and 2022, customers could not make timely withdrawals of cryptocurrency from their Robinhood Crypto accounts to cryptocurrency wallets.

In February 2025, Robinhood completed the $300 million acquisition of TradePMR, a wealth management platform. In March 2025, Robinhood announced the launch of wealth management services, including Robinhood Strategies as well as an AI investment tool, Robinhood Cortex. The following month, the Bank of Lithuania granted the company a brokerage license to operate in Lithuania. Soon after, Robinhood received its MiFID and MICA licenses, allowing Robinhood Europe to operate as a crypto-asset service and payment institution.

In May 2025, Robinhood announced that it would acquire WonderFi, a cryptocurrency trading platform based in Canada.