What's amazing to me about Robinhood's latest blowout earnings quarter (and even the entire last year) is that they accomplished all of that without even really relying on any hype around their investments in AI.
But don’t take Robinhood at face value - once you read between the lines, it becomes clear that Robinhood's AI-driven retirement investing platform is just around the corner and they've actually been telegraphing this launch for almost a year. So why didn't we see it mentioned in Q4-24 earnings?
My spicy take is that they knew crypto-powered Q4 was already going to be such a big tailwind that they left an AI-driven retirement investing launch for Q1/Q2-25 to further juice the stock price hype and phase out launches.
Don't believe me? Follow me down this over-engineered deep dive.
In July 2024, Robinhood acquired Pluto Capital which was using LLMs an AI-powered analysis for a trading platform that supported customized investment strategies based on user's profiles alongside real-time updates and portfolio optimization powered by AI. But despite the press around the acquisition, Robinhood barely made any splash talking explicitly about the “AI-powered tools” they hoped to launch with the purchase.
Jacob Sansbury, Pluto's Founder and CEO became Robinhood's Head of Agentic AI for the following ~10 months before leaving in Dec-24 (perhaps after fully integrating Pluto's tech into Robinhood's new AI investing platform)?
Meanwhile, over the past several months, Robinhood has now been posting roles focusing on an AI Investing team within Product (7+ roles on careers page as of today). Roles focus on using Agentic AI to bridge AI into "production-grade applications" and using AI "define how we leverage AI to change how customers invest."
By October 2024, Robinhood's Retirement Assets Under Custody (AUC) had scaled at incredible pace since launching in Jan-23 and they crossed $10B in AUC.
In November 2024, Robinhood acquired TradePMR which has over $40B in AUA focusing on RIA custody and portfolio management. In public, they said this was to cross-sell Robinhood’s products with RIAs but there's of course the added benefit of enabling Robinhood’s own future RIA.
Fast forward to Robinhood's latest quarterly earnings and we see Retirement AUC continuing to grow at a blistering pace, up to $13B at the end of Q4 with over 1M retirement accounts.
Oh and as of February 2025, they filed plans to launch an RIA with the SEC, making way for at least a robo-advisor but more likely an AI-powered intelligent investing option for for their userbase, dedicated to retirement account management.
Of course, taking the bigger picture view, it makes all the sense in the world to introduce AI investing now and it's not just about the buzz / hype around AI. Every smart fintech knows the good times of the high interest rate environment might not be forever and AUM-based fees and/or cross-sell will do well to offset the impact (Robinhood currently makes ~40% of net revenues on interest-based products).
It's no surprise that Robinhood re-enabled 2% bonuses for transferring in retirement accounts starting in January 2025 and upped retirement contribution matching to 3%.
So remember, when Robinhood "surprises" the Street with an AI-powered investing launch focused on retirement accounts, you heard it here first. I’m eager to see how this gets Robinhood even further on the road to being the modern all-in-one investing platform.
