Robinhood

Robinhood Markets, Inc. operates financial services platform in the United States. Its platform allows users to invest in stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), options, gold, and cryptocurrencies. The company also offers various learning and education solutions comprise Snacks, a digest of business news stories; Learn, which is a collection of approximately articles, including guides, feature tutorials, and financial dictionary; Newsfeeds that offer access to free premium news from various sites, such as Barron's, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal; lists and alerts, which allow users to create custom watchlists and alerts to monitor securities, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies, as well as cash management services; and offers First trade recommendations to all new customers who have yet to place a trade. Robinhood Markets, Inc. was incorporated in 2013 and is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.

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's name comes from its mission to "provide everyone with access to the financial markets, not just the wealthy". Tenev noted that executing a trade cost brokerages "fractions of a penny" but they typically charged fees of $5 to $10 per trade, as well as required account minimums of $500 to $5,000.The firm showcased its app publicly for the first time at LA Hacks, first published it on AppStore in December 2014 and then officially launched the app in March 2015.As of January 2015, 80% of the firm's customers belonged to the "Millennial" demographic and the average customer age was 26. Fifty percent of users who have made a trade use the app daily and 90% use the app weekly. As of 2022, Robinhood had 22.8 million funded accounts and 15.9 million monthly active users.In April 2017, Robinhood raised $110 million at a $1.3 billion valuation led by Yuri Milner of DST Global, Greenoaks Capital, and Thrive Capital.

On May 10, 2018, Robinhood closed a $363 million Series D financing round led by DST Global. As of May 2018, Robinhood raised a total of $539 million in venture capital funding, with the last valuation at $5.6 billion, up from their previous valuation of $1.3 billion.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.In May 2019, reports from Bloomberg and other outlets publicized Robinhood's pursuit of an additional $200 million in funding, which could value the company in the $7 billion to $10 billion range. In November 2019, Robinhood announced its expansion to the United Kingdom.During the 2020 stock market crash, Robinhood trading increased. The subsequent market rise was partially attributed to Robinhood traders, but a study indicated that Robinhood traders had little daily impact on major shares.In May 2020, it was announced that Robinhood had raised $280 million in venture funding at a pre-money valuation of $8.3 billion led by Sequoia Capital, and 3 months later, the company announced a $200 million Series G funding round from a new investor, D1 Capital Partners, on August 17.In late June 2021, Robinhood was fined $57 million by the FINRA and has been ordered to pay $13 million in restitution to clients affected by outages and misleading communications in March 2020. This was the largest-ever FINRA penalty in the history of the organization.The company went public on the Nasdaq on July 29, 2021, under the stock ticker HOOD. The opening price was $38, but dropped shortly afterwards to a low of $33.35 before starting to recover, reaching an all time high at $85. Subsequently, it fell sharply again after facing growing regulatory uncertainty, plunging on Q3 earnings and disclosing that a security breach affected 7 million customers. On 1 December 2021 the stock price reached all time lows below $25 and had dropped 70% over the last four months. This rout was a boon to short-sellers of the stock.Robinhood's further decline was highlighted in its 2022 layoffs, which gained widespread media attention. The first wave of major layoffs occurred in April, with the company cutting its workforce by 9%. More significant were Robinhood's layoff announcement released simultaneously with its 2022 Q2 earnings on August 2, in which Tenev announced the company would layoff 23% of its workforce, mostly in operations, marketing and program management. From January to August 2022, Robinhood's stock value has shed 48% of its value.In August 2022, Robinhood's cryptocurrency division was fined $30 million by the New York State Department of Financial Services for allegedly violating anti-money-laundering and cybersecurity regulations, in the department's first crypto enforcement action.In May 2022, FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda Research, disclosed a 7.6% share in Robinhood. According to anonymous sources cited by Reuters in November 2022, Alameda used Robinhood shares as part of its collateral for a transfer of at least $4 billion from FTX.

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