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In November, Robinhood, the stock trading app, held deal talks with investors to raise a large round of funding. The company was seeking $100 million at a valuation between $600 million and $700 million, according to sources. And then… the round went quiet. Nothing was announced. I assumed it fell apart.
Now sources tell Coins2Day the company is very close to closing a new round of funding with a “much higher” valuation of over $1 billion. Perhaps the company got a boost from all those Uber drivers using Robinhood to buy Snap stock.
A Coins2Day’s Jen Wieczner wrote earlier this month: Robinhood, which has one million total users, says 43% of those who traded on Snap’s first day of trading bought Snap stock. The median age of those Snap investors: 26 years old, the same as Snap CEO Evan Spiegel.
The entire investment world has been hoping Snap’s IPO might get millennials interested in investing. As I wrote in December, most young people don’t play the stock market, according to surveys, because they don’t have the money or the understanding.
A Robinhood representative did not respond to requests for comment.