Robinhood Venture Fund's $75M stake in OpenAI aims to enable retail investments

The private equity investment will be used to give retail customers indirect price exposure to OpenAI through venture tokens.

Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI), a publicly traded closed-end fund that offers retail investors access to private equity investments, announced a $75 million investment in OpenAI.

The company announced on Wednesday that it purchased $75 million of the AI developer's common stock, which will be used as the underlying asset to give Robinhood clients price exposure to OpenAI via the fund's venture tokens.

The investment is “one of RVI’s largest investments to date,” according to RVI president Sarah Pinto, who added that the tokens aim to democratize access to private investing.

Shares of RVI were trading more than 14% higher on Wednesday, to $27.85 at the time of publication, according to data from Yahoo Finance. 

Robinhood’s private equity tokens for retail investors have raised regulatory questions about the legal rights of token holders and how price exposure through tokens differs from holding private equity in a company, which is reserved for qualified investors.

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Robinhood distributed OpenAI and SpaceX tokens to users in June 2025 as part of its rollout of tokenized stock trading for users in the European Union.

However, OpenAI immediately responded to the announcement, warning that the tokens do not represent a private equity stake in the company.

“These ‘OpenAI tokens’ are not OpenAI equity. We did not partner with Robinhood, were not involved in this, and do not endorse it," OpenAI said at the time. "Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval — we did not approve any transfer.”

John Murillo, chief business officer of financial technology company B2BROKER, told Cointelegraph that investors holding these private equity tokens must understand that they do not hold “actual shares” in these companies.

Customers may be entitled to payouts if the underlying shares of the private equity companies increase, but the tokens are strictly a financial instrument created by a third party and not equity, according to Murillo.

“There is no direct claim on company assets, no voting rights and no access to internal financial information,” Murillo said.

A request for comment sent to Robinhood by Cointelegraph was not immediately replied to.

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Source: CoinTelegraph