Robinhood
Robinhood cofounders and co-CEOs Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt.Investors continue to pour money at rising valuations into Robinhood despite the popular investing app facing multiple outages on some of the most volatile trading days in market history earlier this year.
The fintech nabbed $280 million in Series F funding at an $8.3 billion valuation in a round led by previous investor Sequoia Capital. NEA, Ribbit Capital, 9Yards Capital, and Unusual Ventures also participated in the round.
Robinhood's most recent round comes after a $323 million Series E in July 2019 at a $7.6 billion valuation.
In a blog post about the news, Robinhood announced it had added three million funded accounts since the start of the year.
"Robinhood has made the financial markets accessible to the masses, and in turn, revolutionized the decades-old brokerage industry," said Andrew Reed, partner at Sequoia, in a statement. "We're excited to further our relationship with Robinhood, which we believe is at the beginning of its opportunity."
The growth came despite significant outages that plagued the fintech in early March. The app was down for consecutive days during the first week of March as the markets were rocked with volatility. In a note posted on its blog, Robinhood's cofounders, cited "stress to its infrastructure" from an "unprecedented load."
In an interview with Fortune regarding the raise, Vlad Tenev, co-CEO and cofounder, described the outages as a "curveball."
As for the new funding, Tenev earmarked it for further growth.
"The purpose of the capital raise is to enable us to have flexibility and be strategic, and continue to invest in the platform," Tenev told Fortune. "We envision that over the next few years, Robinhood will expand globally and continue rolling out more products."
The latest round is yet another example of Robinhood to continue to raise capital despite slipups.
In December 2018 the startup quickly backtracked from an announcement it made for a planned cash-management product after saying it would be SIPC insured despite not checking with the organization ahead of time. That same month Robinhood's options trading experienced an outage. The startup offered some of those affected $75 Amazon gift cards.
In November 2019, some Robinhood users uncovered an "infinite leverage" glitch.
The following month the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority fined the brokerage $1.25 million for not following "best execution" practices from October 2016 to November 2017.
