Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything event, Tenev said Robinhood took its Ventures Fund I public as a public closed-end fund listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
“You can think of it as like a publicly traded venture capital firm with daily liquidity, no accreditation requirements, and no carry — so just a competitive management fee, no carry,” Tenev said.
Typically, investors in a fund pay a carry of around 20% of their profits in addition to a management fee, Tenev said.
Robinhood Ventures Fund I’s portfolio includes “frontier companies” that are on the frontier of their industries, including OpenAI, Databricks and Stripe, Tenev said.
Robinhood launched the fund because there are private companies raising capital at valuations in the high hundreds of billions, and there are likely to be multiple companies getting into the trillions, before an initial public offering (IPO) that allows retail investors to participate.
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The company advocates making it easier for companies to go public, but it also wants to provide retail investors access to companies that don’t want to go public early.
Robinhood Ventures is the first step in that effort, and the participation of 150,000 retail investors shows that it is “quite democratized,” Tenev said.
“It’s also just the beginning,” Tenev said. “The aspiration is, if you’re a company raising a seed round and a Series A round, so just first capital, retail should be a big chunk of that round, much like it now is in the public markets, and we should let those people in at the ground floor so that they can actually benefit from this potential appreciation that’s increasingly happening in the private markets.”
Robinhood announced in September 2025 that it was introducing a fund designed to expand retail investors’ access to private markets and that it had filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to put in motion the process to advance public shares of the fund.
Robinhood Ventures Fund announced April 22 that it purchased about $75 million in OpenAI common stock and that this investment “underscores our core mission to provide everyday investors with access to what we believe are transformative companies shaping the future.”
