Robinhood Confidentially Files For IPO

Stock-trading app Robinhood confidentially filed for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

The Menlo Park-based company already made the decision to list its shares on the Nasdaq, according to a previous report from CNBC. It is unclear at this time whether Robinhood will choose a traditional IPO or a direct listing.

Since its founding in 2013, Robinhood raised a total of $5.6 billion in known venture funding, according to Crunchbase data. Prominent backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and D1 Capital Partners.

It most recently raised $2.4 billion in convertible notes from an investor group led by Ribbit Capital. This followed an extraordinarily high volume of trading in late January after individual investors drove up shares of video game retailer GameStop and a handful of other stocks, in a kind of retaliation against hedge funds they claimed were shorting those shares.

Robinhood, credited with bringing new retail investors into the stock market, is valued at $20 billion and has a growing list of retail-trading competitors which are raising significant venture funding and gaining traction in the trading platform space.

The company is the latest in a string of companies to enter the public markets. Venture-backed companies that have filed to go public recently include Coinbase, Compass, ThredUp and DigitalOcean.

Illustration: Dom Guzman