robinhood
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Jessica Chen Riolfi and the problem hiding in the paperwork
She helped build fintech products at Wise, Earnin and Robinhood. At Uprise, Jessica Chen Riolfi followed the questions those products left unanswered - all the way to her own tax returns.
Blake Byers and the Long Bet
A Stanford bioengineer became a venture investor with an unusually broad portfolio. Then he left the partnership to help build the kind of ambitious company he had spent a decade backing.
Steijn Pelle
Steijn Pelle is the co-founder and CEO of Lassie, a San Francisco AI company building an autonomous back-office worker that runs the financial admin of independent businesses, starting with dental and medical practices. A Dutch transplant to Silicon Valley with roughly 15 years in startups, he cut his teeth on consumer growth at HealthTap, Coinbase and Robinhood before founding Lassie in 2021. In June 2026 the company raised a $35M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing total funding to $47M, while operating in more than 700 practices across 49 states.
Jessica Chen Riolfi
Jessica Chen Riolfi is the co-founder and CEO of Uprise, a fintech building embedded tax and financial advisory for small business owners. She spent more than a decade shipping products at Wise, Earnin and Robinhood, ran TransferWise's Asia business across 15 countries, and started out in J.P. Morgan investment banking before pairing human advisors with AI to make real financial advice affordable for entrepreneurs.
Peter Dun
Peter Dun is the founder and CEO of Feathery, a San Francisco software company building AI-powered form and workflow tools for regulated industries like financial services, insurance, and healthcare. A Stanford computer science graduate who worked at Google, Citadel Securities, and Robinhood, he started Feathery in 2021 after living through the grind of hand-coding onboarding forms on Robinhood's growth team. Feathery now pairs a developer-friendly form builder with document intelligence and voice AI to pull structured data out of messy PDFs, calls, and emails.
Baiju Bhatt
Baiju Bhatt co-founded Robinhood, the zero-commission trading app that put stock buying on a phone screen and made him one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the US. In 2024 he walked away from finance to chase the idea he grew up with: power and machines in orbit. His company, founded as Aetherflux and rebranded in 2026 as Cowboy Space Corporation, started by trying to beam solar energy to Earth with infrared lasers and has since aimed higher - building rockets and AI data centers that live in low Earth orbit. The son of a NASA scientist, Bhatt is a physicist and self-taught product designer who keeps picking old, stubborn problems and bringing capitalism to them.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Shanthi Shanmugam is the co-founder and CEO of Casap, a New York fintech that uses AI to automate payment disputes, chargebacks, and first-party fraud detection for banks, credit unions, and fintechs. A UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science graduate, she cut her teeth as a product manager at Facebook and spent roughly five years at Robinhood, where she launched the first crypto trading feature and later ran customer-care products. Watching back-office breakdowns erode consumer trust convinced her the dispute process was broken, so she reconnected with a former Facebook colleague, Saisi Peter, and started Casap in 2023. In August 2025 the company raised a $25M Series A led by Emergence Capital, bringing total funding to $33.5M.
Arpan Shah
Arpan Shah is a General Partner at Spark Capital in San Francisco, where he leads early-stage investments in AI, fintech, and data infrastructure. A Stanford-trained engineer from Kolkata, he was on the founding team at Robinhood, later founded Flannel (acquired by Plaid in 2021), and was a partner at Pear VC and a Sequoia Scout before joining Spark in November 2024.
Seth Berman
Seth Berman co-founded Susa Ventures in 2013 and has since backed 10 unicorns across roughly 100 seed-stage investments, including Robinhood, Flexport, and Expanse. He brings an unusual background to venture capital - nearly a decade as VP of Strategic Marketing at Richemont Group (Cartier, Net-A-Porter, Montblanc) - giving him a luxury-brand consumer lens that shaped Susa's focus on distribution, compounding moats, and founder-market fit. He has since launched Kivu Ventures, a Series A/B fund targeting vertical AI, healthcare, and logistics, with investment partners including Frame.io co-founder Emery Wells and Pinterest co-founder Paul Sciarra.
Ilya Fushman
Ilya Fushman is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where he invests in early and growth-stage companies reshaping enterprise software, infrastructure, financial services, and AI. Before VC, he was a senior product leader at Dropbox (employee #75) and a General Partner at Index Ventures. A trained physicist with a Stanford PhD and a Nature paper on quantum computing, Fushman brings rare scientific depth to the investment table - having backed transformative companies including Slack, Robinhood, Rippling, Harvey, and Loom.
Vlad Tenev
Vlad Tenev is the Bulgarian-American co-founder and CEO of Robinhood Markets, the company that forced Wall Street to abolish trading commissions and put a brokerage in every pocket. Born in Varna, Bulgaria, and raised in Virginia after emigrating at age 5, Tenev studied mathematics at Stanford and UCLA before dropping his PhD to build trading software startups. In 2013, he and Baiju Bhatt launched Robinhood to give ordinary people the same tools as professional traders - for free. After navigating the GameStop firestorm, congressional testimony, a bruising post-IPO collapse, and two rounds of layoffs, Tenev rebuilt Robinhood into a diversified financial platform now worth nearly $100 billion and included in the S&P 500. He also co-founded Harmonic, an AI startup pursuing mathematical superintelligence, which reached a $1.45 billion valuation in 2025 after its AI model won a Gold Medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
Jack Raines
Jack Raines is a writer, investor, and author who turned a $150,000 trading loss into a media career and a Penguin Random House book deal. He writes Young Money, a newsletter with 61,000+ subscribers covering behavioral finance, career philosophy, and what your twenties are actually for. He's now an investment associate at Slow Ventures, where he works on their $63M Creator Fund. Known for viral LinkedIn satire that got him reported to Columbia Business School as the 'Bacon Bandit of Hell's Kitchen,' he combines intellectual rigor with a refusal to take himself too seriously.
Andrew Reed
Andrew Reed is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's growth team - possibly the youngest junior partner in Sequoia's history when he joined at 23 from Goldman Sachs in 2014. Over a decade, he's built one of the most impressive growth-stage portfolios in venture capital, with board seats at Figma, Klarna, Bolt, Vanta, Strava, Warp, and Harmonic, and investments in Robinhood, ElevenLabs, Zapier, Phantom, and Sourcegraph. A childhood stutter made him a listener first, which turned into his greatest edge in founder assessment.
Josh Elman
Josh Elman is a veteran Silicon Valley product leader and investor who helped grow Twitter nearly 10x, launched Facebook Connect, and backed foundational consumer products like Discord and Musical.ly at Greylock Partners. Currently Director of Product Management at Apple focused on App Store discovery, he is best known for his 'only metric that matters' framework - the idea that great products are defined by a core action users perform at a predictable frequency, not vanity metrics.