Analysis
Robinhood Ventures Fund I, the publicly traded closed-end fund (NYSE: RVI) built to give retail investors exposure to private companies, has bought roughly $10 million of Cognition, the AI coding-agent startup behind Devin, according to Pulse 2.0. Fund president Sarah Pinto said Cognition "is one of the defining companies of the AI-driven software era."
Pulse 2.0 reports Cognition has "recently passed $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate," up from the roughly $900 million the company disclosed at its last funding round in September -- a company claim Pulse has not independently verified against a filing.
Cognition has moved fast since Scott Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yan founded it in San Francisco in 2023. Devin, the company's autonomous coding agent, and the Windsurf IDE it acquired now count Goldman Sachs, Citi, Wayfair, Mercedes-Benz and Nubank as customers, per the Robinhood filing. Pulse has tracked Cognition's run through a rapid string of rounds:
“Cognition has moved fast since Scott Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yan founded it in San Francisco in 2023.”
- Series A, Sep 2025 -- $400M at a $10.2B valuation, led by Founders Fund.
- Follow-on round, May 2026 -- $1B at a $26B valuation, led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst and 8VC.
- Series E, Sep 2026 -- $2B at a $48B valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel.
Total funding Pulse tracks for Cognition now tops $3.4 billion.
Why Robinhood Built a Retail Door Into Private AI
Robinhood Ventures Fund I holds a concentrated, mostly-private portfolio without requiring investors to be accredited or meet a minimum check size, and it charges a management fee but no performance fee -- unusual for a vehicle holding venture-style assets. That structure puts it alongside ARK Venture Fund and Destiny Tech100 (NYSE: DXYZ), two other retail-accessible closed-end funds that have held stakes in OpenAI, SpaceX and Anthropic. All three exist because an ordinary brokerage account cannot otherwise buy into a company like Cognition before an IPO, and all three bet that demand for that exposure outweighs the difficulty of pricing an illiquid stake on a daily ticker.
Ten million dollars is immaterial next to Cognition's $48 billion valuation or its $3.4 billion in total funding -- at that mark it buys roughly 0.02% of the company, before any discount for illiquidity. Cognition's existing backers are venture and growth investors who negotiate price, information rights and board representation directly; Robinhood's fund buys in on secondary terms it does not control and re-wraps that position for anyone with a brokerage account and no minimum check. The number that matters here is distribution, not capital.
The Catch: Marks You Can't Verify In Real Time
That wrapper carries a cost retail buyers often miss. A closed-end fund holding private stock marks its net asset value periodically, not continuously, so RVI's share price can drift from Cognition's real valuation for months. Destiny Tech100 has traded at a large, swinging premium to its own reported NAV, a structural pattern flagged by analysts including a Seeking Alpha review of that fund -- and the premium can compress quickly once a marquee private holding actually goes public and investors can buy the real thing directly.
Robinhood hasn't said whether the Cognition stake came with information rights or just a price, and it hasn't disclosed how often RVI's marks will update -- the two details retail buyers most need and are least likely to get before the fund's next shareholder report.