2. Robinhood

Baiju-Bhatt-Vlad-Tenev-Robinhood-co-founders

Company: Robinhood

Founder(s): Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev

Website: https://robinhood.com/us/en/

Description: Robinhood is a user-friendly platform offering commission-free trading.

 

Robinhood-logo

 

Founded in 2013, Robinhood is working toward democratising finance for everyone. The platform offers commission-free investing, with products created to help people start investing on their own terms, at their own pace.

The company was founded by Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev, both roommates and classmates at the time in Stanford.

Once the two had graduated, they moved to New York City, built finance companies and sold hedge funds their trading software. It was here that both Bhatt and Tenev discovered how little the big Wall Street firms were paying to trade stocks, while still charging commission for every trade.

Wanting to disrupt the industry, and make financial markets more accessible to everyone (rather than just the wealthy), Bhatt and Tenev took their business to California, where they built Robinhood.

With Robinhood, users can benefit from products including its Cash Management, Stocks & Funds, Crypto and more. The platform also offers an informative “Learn” section, where users can go over investing basics, with a library of informative articles written in plain English and a daily, 3-minute newsletter offering up fresh perspectives on industry news (called Snacks).

So far, Robinhood have raised a total funding amount of $5.6 billion over the course of 21 funding rounds, their latest announced in February of this year (2021), which raised $2.4 billion.