Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD) said on Wednesday that one of it has bought a small $75 million stake in OpenAI, with the purpose of giving retail investors another way into a private, unlisted tech company that cannot yet be touched directly.
According to Robinhood, there are currently more than 6.5 times as many private companies as public and the estimated value of these firms in the US surpassed $10 trillion in the first quarter of 2025.
The deal came through Robinhood Ventures Fund I, or RVI, which only recently began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in March, which means Robinhood now has a listed vehicle tied to private growth companies.
Sarah Pinto, president of Robinhood Ventures Fund I, said in a statement, “OpenAI is one of the frontier artificial intelligence companies, and we are incredibly proud to add them to the Fund.”
“The number of publicly traded companies in the US has fallen from about 7,000 in the year 2000 to about 4,000 in 2025. At the same time, companies are staying private longer and growing in both number and value,” said Robinhood.
Robinhood’s decision comes after last summer’s token fight in Europe
Robinhood and OpenAI were in a public argument last summer, which started after Robinhood began offering tokenized shares tied to OpenAI and SpaceX to users in Europe, but Sam Altman pushed back against that and blocked it, saying those stock tokens did not represent actual equity in the company.
Meanwhile, retail investors have been looking for ways to get close to companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI as the AI trade keeps pulling money and attention across markets, a demand that has also been fed by a broader trend in tech.
Many high-growth companies are staying private for longer. They delay IPOs, raise huge private rounds, keep tighter control, and keep growing without the day-to-day pressure that comes with public markets. For smaller investors, that has made early access much more valuable.
At around $86 a share, the pricing picture of the Robinhood stock is not simple, though it is up 9.3% over the last 7 days and up 21.9% over the last 30 days.
At the same time, it is down 25.0% for the year so far, while still up 105.3% over the last year. Those numbers leave plenty of room for both bullish and cautious takes. Even after the strong one-year gain, Robinhood Markets still has a valuation score of 1 out of 6.
Regardless though, on Wednesday, crypto-linked stocks were among the strongest premarket names in the S&P 500 after President Donald Trump extended a U.S. cease-fire with Iran and Bitcoin kept climbing. Strategy, the biggest corporate holder of Bitcoin, rose 2.2% before the opening bell. Robinhood gained 1.6%. Coinbase added 1.8%.
Iliya Kalchev, an analyst at Nexo, said that the gains in crypto-linked stocks were “all down to Bitcoin.”
