Robinhood Ventures Fund invests $25M in Canva, doubling down on AI-powered tech bets

Robinhood’s venture arm just wrote a $25 million check for Canva stock. For a company best known for democratizing stock trading, the move represents a quieter but arguably more ambitious project: democratizing venture capital itself.

Robinhood Ventures Fund I, trading on the NYSE under the ticker RVI, purchased approximately $25 million worth of Canva’s Class A Common Stock on June 24. The Australian-born design platform, which now serves over 250 million users, becomes the latest addition to a portfolio that’s clearly betting big on AI-powered technology companies.

What RVI is actually building

RVI is structured as a non-diversified closed-end fund. In English: it’s a publicly traded vehicle that holds private-market investments, meaning anyone with a brokerage account can buy shares on the NYSE. The underlying holdings, companies like Canva, remain illiquid. But the fund shares themselves trade freely, giving retail investors a liquid way to access traditionally illiquid bets.

The Canva position isn’t RVI’s first rodeo. The fund previously invested $75 million in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Two investments. $100 million deployed between them. Both in AI-forward companies with massive user bases and global reach.

Why Canva makes sense for the thesis

With over 250 million users, Canva has evolved well beyond basic template editing. The company has been aggressively integrating AI tools into its platform, adding features that can generate images, write copy, and automate design workflows. That AI integration is precisely what makes Canva attractive to a fund laser-focused on frontier technology.

Worth noting: this investment is pure traditional equity. No tokens, no blockchain components, no crypto angle. Despite Robinhood’s well-known crypto trading business, RVI’s portfolio construction appears entirely focused on conventional private-market equity positions in technology companies.

What this means for investors

By listing on a public exchange, the fund lets retail investors buy exposure to pre-IPO companies they’d otherwise never touch. RVI represents an attempt to change that equation, giving retail investors access to private-market opportunities previously reserved for institutional players.

The risk profile is worth considering carefully, though. A non-diversified fund holding concentrated positions in a small number of private companies carries meaningful downside risk. If one of those bets goes sideways, there aren’t dozens of other positions to cushion the blow.

There’s also the question of valuation transparency. Private companies don’t report quarterly earnings the way public ones do. Investors in RVI are, to some degree, trusting the fund’s internal valuation process until these companies either go public or get acquired.

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