Array trading app Robinhood has beaten its rival E-trade when it comes to buyers, doubling the number of accounts in the past year.
The start-up now has 4 million brokerage accounts on its stand. On Thursday, it announced a $363 million funding round, valuing the visitors at $5.6 billion — quadruple from about a year ago.
New investors embodied Sequoia, Google’s venture capital fund Capital G and Iconiq. DST Far-reaching led this Series D round and had facilitated the $110 million round carry on year, when Robinhood had 2 million users.
One of Robinhood’s biggest rivals, E-Trade Financial, which also has a mobile app, had 3.7 million brokerage accounts at the end of Demonstration, with an annualized new account growth rate of 6.6 percent, mutual understanding to the company’s most recent 10-Q filing.
E-Trade Financial did not respond to CNBC’s entreat for comment.
Robinhood offers commission-free stock trading through an app it launched with regard to three years ago. In April, it rolled out cryptocurrency trading for bitcoin and ethereum that’s now readily obtainable in 10 states through “Robinhood Crypto.”
“Crypto has certainly joined to our growth,” Baiju Bhatt, Robinhood co-founder and co-CEO, told CNBC on a phone vetting. “In the next couple of years, I think you’ll see Robinhood looking like a full-service consumer wealth company.”
The start-up’s products, which have done $150 billion in aggregate since their introduction, tend to cater to the “millennial” population, harshly ages 18 to 35. The demographic is often considered a challenge for unwritten financial institutions to reach, and Robinhood is trying to attract the group by gift commission-free trading through an app.
The company generates revenue by taking a wee fraction of a cent per dollar from each trade order as without difficulty completely as collecting interest on customer deposits. In September 2016, the start-up established a paid subscription service called Robinhood Gold.
“I think the scold at which more traditional tech companies are disrupting finance is exciting to see,” Bhatt said. “As it stands we’re leading the pack, we’re excited about accelerating that.”
For cryptocurrency buy, Robinhood has no investment minimums or maximums and no withdrawal limits. The Menlo Reserve, California-based company holds most of the digital coins offline, in what is positive as “cold storage,” to prevent hackers from stealing the coins.
E-Trade and other stockbrokers have been more cautious about cryptocurrency trading, oblation access to bitcoin futures but not the digital currency itself.