Roc Nation, the full-service entertainment management company created by the music impresario Shawn Carter (better known as JAY-Z), is making an investment in financial trading platform Robinhood.
The investment, through Roc Nation’s Arrive subsidiary, is the latest instance of a celebrity rapper plowing cash into Robinhood’s free-to-trade investment platform. The company also counts Snoop Dogg and Nasir Jones (also known as Nas) among its big-time backers.
Robinhood is actually Arrive’s third investment into a high-growth startup tech company. The firm has also backed Devialet, a French audio technology company, and InSite Applications, a location-sharing platform that’s planning to launch its services later this year.
In addition to boatloads of cash, which has valued Robinhood at roughly $1.3 billion, the San Francisco startup has also picked up 3 million users trading in both stocks and cryptocurrency.
Launched last year, Arrive was created to partner with early-stage startups and provide them with brand services, business development, advisory and capital services to increase growth (it’s unclear that this would be all that useful for Robinhood since the company raised $176 million).
“ARRIVE was created to leverage our experience and resources in building brands, developing consumer facing businesses, managing artists and representing athletes. We’ve opened that diversified, global range of expertise to a new vertical: entrepreneurs and their early stage businesses” said Neil Sirni, head of New Ventures at Roc Nation in a statement at the time of the company’s launch.
Arrive said at the time it would launch a traditional venture fund to support company growth after the seed round. The New York-based venture firm Primary Venture Partners and GlassBridge Asset Management are both advising Arrive on its operations.
(Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for TIDAL)