Robinhood’s second venture fund starts trading on the NYSE on Thursday under the ticker RVII, and with it the retail brokerage is trying to do something no one has done at scale: put a diversified portfolio of startup SAFEs in the hands of ordinary investors.
Robinhood Ventures Fund II is a business development company, a closed-end fund structure that lets the public buy into private-company investing without passing the SEC’s accredited-investor test. The fund priced its IPO at $25.00 per share after closing its order book on August 12, with Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and UBS running the offering. Net asset value stood at $23.35 per share on roughly 1.09 million shares outstanding as of July 31, and a pre-IPO stock split was set so NAV plus the 4.50% sales load lands at the $25.00 offer price.
The vehicle is a newly organized Delaware statutory trust managed by Robinhood Ventures, which collects a 2.00% annual base management fee on net assets plus a 20% incentive fee on capital gains. The prospectus estimates total annual expenses around 4.18% of net assets, a reminder that access to private markets does not come cheap, and that SAFE valuations can sit static for years before a conversion event moves them.
A portfolio built from Y Combinator’s pipeline
The strategy is tightly bound to Y Combinator. The fund focuses on companies that are current or previous participants in the accelerator, or that have a founder who went through it, and roughly 500-700 startups join Y Combinator every year. As of July 31, the portfolio held about 80 companies, nearly all through simple agreements for future equity at $250,000 apiece. The largest position is Shortwave Communications, which operates the AI-agent brand Tasklet, at $1 million, a 4.5% slice of the fund.
The sector split leans heavily on technology at 64.3% of assets, followed by industrials at 9.0%, financial services at 7.8%, and healthcare at 6.7%, with cash and equivalents making up roughly 7.4% at the fund’s July 15 snapshot. The names inside read like a YC batch list: Agentic Fabriq, which builds the control plane for AI agents; Arga Labs, which runs real-world sandboxes for testing agent-facing software; Apex Flux, which builds AI agents for complex scheduling; Asimov Robotics, which collects human movement data for humanoid robots; and Shortwave’s Tasklet, which sells AI agents that own work end to end.
Beyond the agent stack sit Apollo Atomics, which is developing ultra-compact nuclear reactors; AxionOrbital, which is building foundation models for 24/7 Earth observation; Voxel Energy, which powers data centers with solar and repurposed batteries; and Workable Solutions, which sells an AI-native code hosting platform under the /dev/fast brand. The healthcare corner includes Adialante’s accessible MRI-based cancer screening and BioStack’s real-world training environments for healthcare AI.
The pitch: a closed door, opened
The fund’s core argument is about who gets to participate in venture returns. The median time from founding to IPO stretched from five years in 1999 to 14 years by 2024, which means the biggest wealth-creation phase of a startup’s life now happens entirely in the private market. Yet under SEC rules, only about 12.6% of U.S. individuals qualify as accredited investors, a legal threshold that locks more than eight in ten Americans out of exactly the investments the prospectus argues have generated much of modern economic growth.
The numbers behind that argument are stark. U.S. venture capital deployed $320.0 billion in 2025, the second-highest annual total on record behind the 2021 peak of $358.2 billion, and the industry manages $1.38 trillion in total assets. Roughly 859 venture-backed private companies were valued at $1 billion or more at the end of 2025, worth an estimated $4.34 trillion combined. When those companies eventually go public or sell, most of the returns flow to the endowments, sovereign wealth funds, and wealthy individuals who were allowed in early, the exact group RVII is trying to widen.
The fund also carries structural innovations beyond the BDC wrapper. Its shares trade without lockup periods, redemption gates, or capital call obligations, a deliberate contrast to the closed-end funds and interval funds that have historically been the only retail-accessible route into private assets. Investors who want out can simply sell on the exchange, and the fund expects to hold its investments through their natural private-phase arc, seeking value at acquisition, public offering, or secondary sale.
What to watch
RVII’s debut is as much a test of appetite as it is a new product. The offering raised money through Robinhood’s IPO Access feature, giving the brokerage’s own customers first crack at the shares, and the fund’s $25.00 price point is deliberately low to make share-count math approachable. The real question is whether a 4.18% expense ratio and a 4.5% load can coexist with the retail-friendly pitch, and whether SAFEs, which are notorious for years of static valuation, can generate the visible returns a public-market audience expects.
Robinhood’s first fund, RVI, set the template. Fund II widens the ambition: a diversified, YC-heavy portfolio, a top holding in an AI-agent company, and a structure that treats private investing like public investing. For the 87% of Americans who cannot pass the accredited-investor test, it is the closest thing to a seat at the table they have ever been offered.
