User:BC1278/sandbox/Robinhood

Robinhood Markets Inc, referenced informally as Robinhood, is a U.S.-based financial services company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The company offers a mobile app and website that allows people to invest in publicly traded companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges, exchange-traded funds, options and cryptocurrencies without paying a commission.

As of its latest funding round in May 2018, the company was valued at $5.6 billion.

Operations
Robinhood operates a website and mobile apps for iPhone, Apple Watch, and Android. The company has no storefront offices and operates entirely online. The firm is a FINRA-approved broker-dealer, registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and is a member of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation.

History
The firm was founded by Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt who had previously built high-frequency trading platforms for financial institutions in New York City.

Robinhood launched out of stealth and announced an initial $3 million in seed funding in December 2013. While in private beta, fifty percent of users who made a trade used the app daily and 90% came back to the app weekly. As of January 2015, while still in private beta, 80% of the firm's customers belonged to the demographic "millennials" (people between the ages 18 and 29) and the average customer age was 26.

The app officially launched no commission trading in March 2015, after having amassed a wait list of 800,000 people.

As of February 2017, the company had executed over $30 billion in trades. In April 2017, Robinhood raised $110 million at a $1.3 billion valuation led by Yuri Milner from DST Global, and Greenoaks Capital and Thrive Capital.

In August 2017, the company began offering free stocks in exchange for referring new users.

The company's main source of revenue in 2017 came from interest earned on customers' cash balances and margin lending. It later added a "Gold" subscription for a monthly fee, allowing people to borrow money for margin buying. And it earned rebates for directing order flow to broker dealers. Bloomberg News reported in October 2018 that Robinhood receives almost half of its revenue from payment for order flow.

As of January 2018, 78% of the firm's customers belonged to the demographic "millennials" (people between the ages of 23 and 38) and the average customer age was 31.

On January 25, 2018, the company announced a waitlist for commission-free cryptocurrency trading. As of 9:00PM on January 25, 2018 the wait list for enabling the feature grew to more than 1,250,000. The next month, Robinhood began offering commission-free trading of Bitcoin and Ethereum to users in California, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Montana. In May 2018, Robinhood expanded its Crypto trading platform to Wisconsin and New Mexico. Robinhood's crypto trading platform was available in 30 states, as of June 2019.

By February 2018, Robinhood had 3 million user accounts, around the same number as the online broker E-Trade. Robinhood had grown to 6 million accounts, as of October 2018.

On May 10, 2018, closed a $363 million Series D financing round led by DST Global. , Robinhood had raised a total of $539 million in venture capital funding, with the last valuation at $5.6 billion, up from their previous evaluation of $1.3 billion.

In September 2018, Seeking Alpha published a critique of the Robinhood platform's use of payment for order flow as the company's primary source of revenue.

The company said in October 2018 it had started processing trades through its own clearing agency. By no longer paying fees to outside firms, it decreased its costs.

In June 2018, it was reported that the company was in talks to obtain a US banking license, but Robinhood declined to comment on the matter. In December Robinhood announced checking and savings accounts, with debit cards in partnership with Sutton Bank, to be available in early 2019. Robinhood initially claimed the accounts would be SIPC insured, which the SIPC denied. The products were rebranded as "cash management" the next day. In December 2018, the waitlist and sign up page were removed from the app.