Robinhood Markets
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, options, index options, futures contracts, outcomes 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, as well as a news website, Sherwood.News. The company's revenue comes from payment for order flow and commissions on options, cryptocurrency, equities, and other products such as futures and event contracts ; net interest income, and other sources. The company has 27.4 million funded customers and $279 billion in assets under custody. Its platform is available in the U.S., the UK, and, for trading cryptocurrency and tokenized stocks and ETFs only, in the European Union. Approximately 2 billion option contracts are traded annually on the Robinhood platform.
The company has been referred to as an innovator in zero-commission stock trading, as it relies on other sources of revenues. Robinhood has targeted millennials as customers; in March 2025, the average age of its customers was 35.
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.
History
Robinhood was founded in April 2013 by Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, 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 "provide everyone with access to the financial markets, not just the wealthy". They aimed to design a mobile app that was free, easy to use, and addictive. Tenev and Bhatt served as co-CEOs from 2013 to 2020, when Tenev became the sole CEO and Bhatt became chief creative officer.The founders presented the mobile app at LA Hacks in April 2014 and launched a beta release in December on the Apple App Store. The mobile app was launched officially in March 2015.
In February 2018, the company announced that it would be moving its headquarters from Palo Alto to the former headquarters of Sunset magazine in Menlo Park. That same month, Robinhood launched cryptocurrency trading.
Robinhood launched banking products with insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation via partner banks in December 2019.
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 July 2021, the company went public and was listed on Nasdaq.
In April 2022, Robinhood cut its workforce by 9%. In August that year, the company announced additional layoffs of 23% of its workforce, mostly in operations, marketing and program management. The following June, Robinhood announced additional layoffs of 150 employees or about 7% of its staff.
In March 2024, Robinhood 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 2025, Robinhood announced the launch of wealth management services. 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 cryptocurrency exchange. In June 2025, the company launched trading in tokenized ETFs and stocks in the European Union.
In July 2025, Robinhood reported 26.7 million customers.
Acquisitions
| Year | Company | Approximate price | Description | Ref. |
| MarketSnacks | Financial newsletter | |||
| March 2021 | Binc | Recruiting firm | ||
| Say Technologies | $140 million | Helps shareholders vote proxies and ask questions of management | ||
| Cove Markets | Developer of cryptocurrency trading platforms | |||
| X1 | $95 million | Credit card issuance startup | ||
| Chartr | Publisher of a daily financial newsletter | |||
| Marex FCM | Broker of futures contracts | |||
| Pluto Capital | AI-powered investment research platform | |||
| TradePMR | $300 million | Wealth management platform | ||
| WonderFi | $180 million | Cryptocurrency trading platform | ||
| Bitstamp | $200 million | Cryptocurrency exchange |
Financing history
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 following 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. In May 2015, the company raised $50 million in a Series B round led by New Enterprise Associates.Robinhood raised $110 million in a Series C round at a $1.3 billion valuation in April 2017, bringing its total funding raised to $176 million. Investors included Yuri Milner of DST Global, Greenoaks Capital, and Thrive Capital. In May 2018, Robinhood closed a $363 million Series D financing round led by DST Global, bringing its total equity funding to $539 million. Robinhood raised $323 million in a Series E venture funding round led by DST Global, the following July.
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. Three months later, the company announced a $200 million Series G funding round from a new investor, D1 Capital Partners.
The company went public via an initial public offering on the Nasdaq on July 29, 2021, raising approximately $2.1 billion and valuing Robinhood at about $32 billion.
In November 2022, as part of the bankruptcy of FTX, the U.S. government seized the 7.6% stake in Robinhood owned by Alameda Research, which were used as partial collateral for a transfer of at least $4 billion from FTX. The shares were sold back to Robinhood for $605 million, or $10.96 per share.
Controversies
Order execution
Robinhood receives a significant portion of its revenue from payment for order flow and relies on this source of revenue more than its rivals. This has been criticized as a "backdoor commission" or kickback. The company has been criticized for routing orders to market makers that pay the most instead of those that offer the best order execution. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority fined Robinhood $1.25 million in December 2019 for failing to ensure that its customers received the best price for orders, instead routing orders based on payments that it receives from market makers.In December 2020, the company paid $65 million to settle accusations by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it failed to disclose these kickbacks, that Robinhood customers' orders were executed at prices that were inferior to other brokers' prices resulting in $34.1 million in losses by customers on certain trades compared to if they were executed by other brokers at the best execution, and that Robinhood made false and misleading statements to the contrary.
Also in December 2020, Robinhood was sued in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California for failing to disclose to customers that it received payment for order flow, leading to inferior trade prices. As of January 2025, the plaintiffs were seeking class action status. The case was consolidated with others under Kwon v. Robinhood Financial LLC.
Security breaches
In July 2019, Robinhood admitted to storing some customer passwords in an unencrypted cleartext format within internal systems. However, the company found no evidence of abuse. Passwords were then hashed using the Bcrypt algorithm and the company advised customers to change their passwords.In October 2020, Robinhood found that almost 2,000 Robinhood accounts were compromised and that the hackers had siphoned off customer funds. The incident did not stem from a breach of company systems; the users' personal email addresses had been compromised outside of Robinhood.
In November 2021, a voice phishing scheme on a Robinhood employee resulted in about 5 million customers having their email addresses stolen, 2 million customers having their full names disclosed and 300 customers having their dates of birth disclosed. It is believed that Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, owner of BreachForums, who was responsible for the 2021 FBI email hack and was arrested in March 2023, was responsible for the breach.