Starting Aug. 13, you can buy into 80 seed-stage startups on the New York Stock Exchange for $25 a share, with no accreditation required.
Robinhood Ventures Fund II, trading under the ticker RVII, plans to raise $200 million through an initial public offering of 8 million shares.
Goldman Sachs is the lead underwriter, with Citigroup, JPMorgan, UBS, and Wells Fargo serving as bookrunners, and the book closes on Aug. 12.
The fund gives retail investors access to something previously reserved for venture capitalists and accredited buyers: direct exposure to early-stage private companies.
Robinhood itself, however, labels the offering “speculative” in its prospectus and warns of a “high degree of risk” with “substantial risk of loss.”
What RVII holds, how it charges, and where fees add up
The fund’s portfolio consists entirely of seed investments in companies connected to Y Combinator, the startup accelerator that has funded over 5,000 companies since 2005.
Y Combinator’s combined portfolio has a valuation above $1.3 trillion and includes over 100 companies valued above $1 billion, Robinhood noted in its announcement.
The management fee runs 2% of net assets annually, with an additional 20% incentive fee on realized capital gains after deducting losses and depreciation.
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Rich Aberman, Robinhood Ventures Fund II portfolio manager, wants everyday investors to become a fixture in initial startup fundraising.
“As Robinhood Ventures scales, our mission is for it to become the norm that retail is represented in your seed or Series A cap table,” Aberman said.
Total estimated annual expenses reach 4.18%, meaning holdings must clear that threshold every year before generating any positive shareholder returns, Robinhood reported.
Robinhood Financial customers and investment advisers on the TradePMR Fusion platform will have first access, with no accreditation requirements or investment minimums imposed.
How a business development company structure differs from a standard fund
RVII is structured as a business development company, a type of closed-end fund registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission under specific regulatory guidelines.
Unlike an exchange-traded fund or mutual fund, a business development company does not allow shareholders to redeem shares at net asset value.
Shareholders instead sell on the open market, where the price depends on what another buyer will pay rather than the fund’s internal valuation.
Closed-end fund shares commonly trade below their net asset value, which means your position can decline even when the portfolio’s underlying worth increases over time.
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Robinhood’s prospectus acknowledges this dynamic, stating that RVII shares “may trade at a discount or premium to net asset value” once listed on the exchange.
Those discounts tend to persist rather than correcting toward full value, and funds holding illiquid assets typically carry the widest gaps, Fidelity noted.
The fund’s limited operating history adds another layer of uncertainty because there is no performance track record against which shareholders can measure management decisions.
Seed-stage investing has the highest failure rate in venture capital
The distinction between RVII and its predecessor matters because seed-stage investing occupies the riskiest position on the venture capital spectrum of funding stages.
Startup Genome data widely cited in venture research puts the startup failure rate near 90%.
Seed-stage companies sit at the beginning of that survival curve, before proving whether customers will pay or whether their unit economics can sustain any growth.
Median time from founding to IPO grew from five years in 1999 to 14 years by 2024, Robinhood disclosed in its prospectus filing.
Y Combinator has produced over 100 companies valued above $1 billion, but that figure represents only a fraction of 5,000 total startups backed.
Those billion-dollar successes include Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and Coinbase, companies that were once seed-stage startups with no guarantee of reaching public markets.
Total venture capital deployment in the United States reached $320 billion in 2025, with overall assets under management climbing to $1.38 trillion, the National Venture Capital Association’s 2026 Yearbook noted.
How RVII compares to Robinhood’s first venture fund
Robinhood’s first fund, RVI, launched in March at $25 per share and raised $658.4 million, exceeding RVII’s target by more than threefold, Robinhood noted in its disclosure.
RVI holds late-stage positions including a roughly $75 million stake in OpenAI purchased in April 2026, alongside disclosed positions in Databricks, Stripe, Ramp, Revolut, and several other private companies, according to Robinhood Ventures’ investment announcements.
RVII targets seed-stage companies that are years away from generating meaningful revenue, which represents a fundamentally different risk profile for retail shareholders who participate.
“The next generation of promising startups is being built today,” Sarah Pinto, head of Robinhood Ventures, said in the company’s official announcement of the fund.
“Retail investors no longer have to wait until a company’s IPO to be part of an early growth journey,” Pinto added in the same statement.
RVII opens seed-stage startup exposure to retail investors, but its own prospectus flags a 4.18% expense load and a business development company structure that can trade at a discount to net asset value.
Broader venture research from Failory and Harvard Business School puts the failure rate for venture-backed companies at roughly 75%.
Those disclosures are the risk profile Robinhood itself has published for prospective shareholders.
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