Robinhood Markets, the popular stock trading app, is working with Goldman Sachs for its initial public offering (IPO) preparations, which could value the company at $20 billion, Reuters reported.
The IPO could come out next year, Reuters reported, citing sources, who also said the exact timing would be subject to market conditions.
In its last private fundraising round in September, Robinhood was valued at $11.7 billion, and a $20 billion value would show the growth in the company's platform, which has worked to give millennials an easy way to get into amateur stock market trading.
When consumers were in quarantine earlier in the year due to the pandemic, Robinhood saw a surge in use. According to Reuters, the popularity of the app could be connected to the volatility in stock trading this year, including both large cap companies and those in bankruptcy.
PYMNTS reported that the app signed a record 3 million new users in the first four months of the year. The company, which PYMNTS described as "pandemic-proof," has favored younger, savvy clients who are acting in a risk-averse manner by capitalizing on market downturns, according to Co-Founder and Co-CEO Vlad Tenev. Tenev said those customers are seeing this as the beginning of their trading journey.
The company has raised over $2 billion from private investors, according to data from PitchBook, per Reuters, with backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia and Ribbit Capital, as well as celebrities like rapper Snoop Dogg and actor Jared Leto.
The Robinhood IPO could be the next in a wave of popular tech companies planning to go public soon, including cloud-based data warehousing company Snowflake, data analytics firm Palantir Technologies and popular vacation rental company Airbnb. The IPO market, skewed by the way the pandemic accelerated tech trends as well as low interest rates and the Federal Reserve printing money, has been supercharged as of late, Reuters reported.
