Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Yesterday news broke that Robinhood is on the hunt for new capital at a roughly flat valuation, per friend of the blog Katie Roof. If you are a bit confused by the news, I understand. Robinhood went through a gauntlet of bad press and user complaints after it suffered from some embarrassing downtime back in March, and isn’t the capital market for private companies in rough shape?
But the round is more reasonable than you’d think, namely because Robinhood’s revenue has reached real scale, and, like other savings and investing-focused financial applications, it’s enjoying a boom in demand. Showing that there’s buzz in helping people save, let’s talk about Robinhood briefly and dig into some other metrics from its loose cohort of companies (including M1 Finance, more about them in a moment) .