U.S. fintech Robinhood has reportedly secured an additional $320 million in funding through its Series F investment round. Robinhood previously announced it raised $280 million through the round, which was led by Sequoia Capital. Founded in 2013, Robinhood is on a mission is to democratize finance for all. The company noted it believes it should work for everyone and not just a few by offering commission-free trading in one, user-friendly platform.
Upon the original announcement of its Series F round, Robinhood reported that amid the current challenging times and market volatility, it is humble that people are turning to the fintech’s service to participate in the markets and build their financial futures.
“We added more than three million funded accounts so far this year, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to serve each customer. We’re also proud to have built a platform that empowers people: Half of new Robinhood customers this year were first-time investors.”
The investment does come just a few months after the company’s software experienced performance issues and outrages, which was notably during a historic market rout as a combination of COVID-19 pandemic and a dramatic plunge in the oil market occurred. Robinhood luckily had its services restored in several steps with all services being back up and running within a matter of hours. Fintech messaged in a blog post following the previous outages that its apparent popularity was part of the cause:
“Multiple factors contributed to the unprecedented load that ultimately led to the outages. The factors included, among others, highly volatile and historic market conditions; record volume; and record account sign-ups.”
Robinhood also recently announced it was making a commitment to improving its Options offering. According to Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs, the improvements follow the recent news that Alex Kearns, a Robinhood customer, died by suicide and let a noting citing confusion with the Robinhood product. The duo further revealed that they reached out to Kearns’ family to discuss the situation and offer condolences. They also shared:
“Over the past week, our team at Robinhood has been focused on identifying how we can improve Robinhood’s customer experience, specifically around our option flows involving multi-leg exercise and assignment.”
Changes to the platform will be the following:
- Eligibility: Robinhood is considering additional criteria and education for customers seeking level 3 options authorization to help ensure customers understand more sophisticated options trading.
- Educational resources: Robinhood is expanding our educational content related to options trading. It has added information on early options assignments to its help center and it will be hiring an Options Education Specialist to further enhance education related to our options offering.
- User Interface: In the near term, Robinhood is rolling out improvements to in-app messages and emails we send customers about their multi-leg options spreads. Robinhood is also adding detail to the in-app history page to help users understand the mechanics of early options assignments.
Robinhood also filed a Form D in June indicating it had raised 430,275,000 out of a $600 million funding round thus it appears the round was completely subscribed. At the time of the filing, Robinhood noted that 17 investors had participated.