Robinhood, the stock and cryptocurrency trading app, has raised $280 million in Series F funding, at an $8.3 billion valuation.
The round was led by venture capital firm Sequoia, and included NEA, Ribbit Capital, 9Yards Capital, and Unusual Ventures. Robinhood had aimed to raise $250m at a valuation of $8 billion, but beat the target by a significant margin despite the COVID-19 crisis induced global economic downturn.
Indeed, despite the platform suffering from several serious outages in March, including one of which may have caused users to miss out on the Dow Jones’ biggest ever one-day rally, it has seen revenue surge during the COVID-19 crisis – going from USD $20m in March 2019, to a record $60m in March 2020.
In response to March’s outages, which have already resulted a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of several traders, Robinhood has pledged to reimburse those affected on a case-by-case basis.
Focused on making trading easy, and providing a wealth of easy-to-follow informative content to help everyday investors, Robinhood provides commission-free trading for a range of major cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Litecoin (LTC), alongside altcoins like Ethereum Classic (ETC) and Dogecoin (DOGE).
Illustrating its clear appeal to everyday investors, the platform says that out of the 3 million funded accounts added so far in 2020, 50% are first-time investors.
AYO.NEWS says:
Robinhood’s phenomenal funding round and surge in popularity, despite serious technical problems in March, may well be indicative of a general feeling, among both venture capital funds and individual retail investors, that the traditional markets are about to take an unprecedented hammering as the full scale of the economic catastrophe caused by the misguided lockdowns sinks in.
As many have pointed out over the last few weeks, Bitcoin (BTC) may have been born in the fallout of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, but may well be the coming crisis, which could be orders of magnitude greater, that sees it and other cryptocurrencies come into their own.
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