Robinhood's Vlad Tenev: prediction markets heading to trillions, private markets access is the biggest inequity in finance

Summary

Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood, outlined the company's 2026 strategy around three areas: prediction markets scaling into a trillion-dollar asset class, family finance tools rewarding multi-generational adoption, and democratizing private market access.

Prediction markets are in a "super cycle" that will grow from tens of billions to trillions in annual volume. The immediate challenge is user segmentation. Some customers want prediction markets prominent; others want them hidden. Robinhood is investing in machine learning and AI to deliver tightly personalized experiences, letting users opt in or out of different product categories. Prediction markets attract new customer cohorts who might never download the app otherwise. Once onboarded, those users discover adjacent products like retirement accounts and credit cards. Tenev argues these are not separate customer types but the same people holding both speculative and conservative portfolios.

On private markets, Tenev calls the current inequity "one of the biggest" in financial services. The regulatory path in the US runs through Robinhood Ventures, which filed an N-2 with the SEC and is currently in quiet period. Internationally, Robinhood is pursuing tokenization. Last year's OpenAI and SpaceX stock token giveaways showed "voracious demand." This year's goal is moving from giveaways to tradable products and getting companies to voluntarily participate by framing tokenization as beneficial to them, not just retail shareholders.

Tenev reflected that if Robinhood could replay its early days, it would have opened seed-round investment to retail from day one. Robinhood sat on AngelList at a $10 million valuation cap and took all comers. Retired Nebraskans pitched the same as Andreessen Horowitz. Some early retail investors held through IPO and have done quite well.

On AI's impact to wealth management, Tenev acknowledged disruption is coming but sees a two-track future. Robinhood Cortex is already helping customers think through trading decisions. The company is in early conversations with regulators about expanding it to give advice and manage portfolios. On the human advisor side, AI will let advisers scale from managing 50 clients to 500 or more by automating workflow rather than replacing them entirely. Both models continue; costs and capabilities improve for each.

Robinhood Social, a copy-trading product integrating prediction markets, rolls out within weeks to a few months. A popular feature is whale tracking, such as following Nancy Pelosi's trades.

On engineering productivity, Tenev said Robinhood is still hiring software engineers but not at 2021 rates. AI has been the main lever for maintaining high product velocity while keeping costs flat. In customer support, 75% of all tickets are now handled by AI, including cases that previously required licensed brokerage professionals. On the engineering side, newer model generations like Opus and Claude can run autonomously overnight, checking and debugging their own output. That work would have taken individual engineers weeks. The year-over-year acceleration from each new model generation is "tremendous."

Tenev framed this as a structural advantage for fintech firms that move to cloud and adopt AI relative to legacy competitors still running on mainframes. Robinhood has integrated acquisitions well. Bitstamp has doubled revenue since acquisition. Tenev remains bullish on crypto, viewing it as cyclical and positioning the company to build during downturns.