Robinhood's Retail-Only VC Fund Drops $34.6M on Stripe & ElevenLabs, Aims to Crash the Private Party

Robinhood's new Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI) has officially stopped just talking about the private-market party and has started buying the drinks, publicly acquiring stakes in two major companies. The closed-end fund shelled out roughly $14.6 million for Stripe shares and another $20 million for ElevenLabs preferred stock in deals that closed back in March.

RVI began trading on the NYSE on March 6, finally giving the retail crowd a stock ticker to ape into for a slice of the private company action—a sector traditionally gated by velvet ropes for VCs and the yacht club. It’s like getting a public-market IOU for a pre-IPO moonshot.

The Stripe acquisition, involving that ubiquitous payments infrastructure born in 2010, was a secondary purchase; Robinhood bought existing shares from someone else, not exactly a fresh mint. Meanwhile, the $20 million for ElevenLabs, the London-based AI voice wizard startup from 2022, was a primary round, meaning the cash went straight into the company's treasury—presumably to fund more eerily accurate celebrity voice clones.

The fund’s portfolio already boasts private heavyweights like Databricks, Revolut, Ramp, and Oura, with promises of more picks to come. Robinhood pitches this whole maneuver as a necessary correction to a broken system: while public listings in the U.S. have been in a two-decade slump, the private markets have ballooned to a staggering $10 trillion, leaving Main Street investors watching from the nosebleed seats.

CEO Vlad Tenev has been vocal about the inequity, noting that “wealthy people and institutions have invested in private companies while retail investors have been locked out.” In a refreshing twist from typical VC gatekeeping, RVI doesn’t demand you be an accredited investor and foregoes performance fees, effectively replacing a six-figure minimum with the price of a single share.

This push follows Robinhood’s previous experiment with offering tokenized shares of big-name firms to its European users—a scheme that raised more regulatory eyebrows than a degen trading a memecoin on leverage.

By adding Stripe and ElevenLabs to its cart, Robinhood is doubling down on its bets in fintech and AI, two sectors that continue to vacuum up capital while teasing eventual public debuts. On the day of the news, HOOD stock enjoyed a modest 2% bump to $76.78, while RVI itself dipped a barely noticeable 0.4%, because even democratized access doesn't guarantee green candles.