 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Venture Capital |
| Founded | 2012 |
| Founders | Micky Malka |
| Headquarters | Palo Alto, California |
| AUM | US$12 billion (2024) |
Number of employees | 31 (2024) |
| Website | ribbitcap |
| Footnotes /references [1] | |
Ribbit Capital (Ribbit) is an American investment firm based in San Francisco, California. The firm focuses on investments related to fintech. It is an early investor in Robinhood Markets and Bitcoin.
In 2012, Ribbit was founded in Silicon Valley by Micky Malka, an entrepreneur from Venezuela who had founded several financial services companies. [2] [3] [4] [5] Ribbit means interest in Hebrew. [2]
Ribbit's began fundraising for its first fund in February 2012 and announced it was completed in January 2013. Investors included Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria and Silicon Valley Bank. The fund raised $100 million which would be invested in startups related to financial services across the globe. It was expected to invest in 12 to 15 companies primarily in Series A and B rounds. [2]
In 2013 after the first fund was raised, Ribbit Became an early proponent of cryptocurrencies, investing some of the money directly in Bitcoin as well as the exchange Coinbase. [6]
Ribbit grew rapidly and by 2015, it had secured $446 million from investors which was the fourth-largest amount raised among all US venture capital firms since 2012. Its investor based grew to include institutional investors such as Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Capital and individuals such as David Lawee and Sheryl Sandberg. While the firm made lucrative investments such as Credit Karma, it had also missed out on others such as TransferWise. [4] Ribbit established a reputation as a venture capital firm in the world of fintech. [5]
Ribbit launched a Special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) named Ribbit Leap that held its initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2020. However the SPAC was not able to find a merger partner and in August 2022 it was liquidated with Ribbit returning $403 million to investors. Scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was cited as one of the reasons for abandoning the merger search. [3] [7]
In January 2021, Walmart announced it entered a partnership with Ribbit to create a new fintech startup to further expand its financial services offerings. It would be majority-owned by Walmart. [8] The startup is named One and in December 2024, it had a valuation of $2.5 billion after Walmart and Ribbit lead a $300 million funding round. [9]
Robinhood Markets is Ribbit's biggest investment to date where since 2014, it has invested over $500 million in the company. In February 2021. Ribbit led an emergency funding round of $3.4 billion for Robinhood Markets which was the largest since the company's inception in 2013. This came shortly after the GameStop short squeeze where Robinhood Markets needed cash urgently to put up collateral. The deal stated that Ribbit and other investors would be able convert the debt into equity at a discount to Robinhood Market's future IPO price. [3] [6]
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and often come from high technology industries such as information technology (IT) or biotechnology.
Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneurs in over 900 ventures, including America Online, Amazon.com, Tandem Computers, Compaq, Electronic Arts, JD.com, Square, Genentech, Google, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Nest, Palo Alto Networks, Synack, Snap, AppDynamics, and Twitter. By 2019 it had raised around $9 billion in 19 venture capital funds and four growth funds.
Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California which specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. As of 2022, the firm had approximately US$85 billion in assets under management.
Timothy Cook Draper is an American venture capital investor, and founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Draper University, Draper Venture Network, and Draper Associates. Since 2019, he is a partner in Draper Goren Holm. His most prominent investments include Baidu, Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, SpaceX, AngelList, SolarCity, Ring, Twitter, DocuSign, Coinbase, Robinhood, Ancestry.com, Twitch, Cruise Automation, PrettyLitter and Focus Media. In July 2014, Draper received wide coverage for his purchase at a US Marshals Service auction of seized bitcoins from the Silk Road website. Draper is a proponent of bitcoin and decentralization. Draper was one of the first investors in Theranos.
Khosla Ventures is a private American venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by entrepreneur Vinod Khosla in 2004.
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Klaus Hommels is a German venture capitalist. He focuses on early and growth-stage investments and has founded his own venture capital fund by the name of Lakestar, through which he has been investing mainly in digital businesses. He has been invested in Facebook, Skype and Xing; other examples are Klarna and Revolut.
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With over $25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of the world's largest venture capital firms.
Chamath Palihapitiya is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian and American venture capitalist, engineer, SPAC sponsor, and the founder and CEO of Social Capital. Palihapitiya was an early senior executive at Facebook, working at the company from 2007 to 2011. Following his departure from Facebook, Palihapitiya started The Social+Capital Partnership, through which he invested in several companies, including Yammer and Slack. He is also the co-host of technology podcast All-In, where along with David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, and David Friedberg.
Drive Capital is a venture capital firm headquartered in Columbus, Ohio.
Circle is a peer-to-peer payments technology company that now manages stablecoin USDC, a cryptocurrency the value of which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. USDC, the second largest stablecoin worldwide, is designed to hold at or near a stable price of $1. The majority of its stablecoin collateral is held in short-term U.S. government securities.
Robinhood Markets, Inc. is an American financial services company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The company provides an electronic trading platform accessible via mobile app that facilitates commission-free trades of stocks, exchange-traded funds and cryptocurrency, as well as cryptocurrency wallets, credit cards and other banking services. The company's revenue comes from transaction-based revenues, net interest income, and subscription fees. The company has 24.3 million funded customers, 11.0 million monthly active users, and $152 billion in assets under custody.
Valar Ventures is a US-based venture capital fund founded by Andrew McCormack, James Fitzgerald and Peter Thiel in 2010. Historically, the majority of the firm's investments have been in technology startups based outside of Silicon Valley, including in Europe, the UK, the US and Canada. Valar Ventures originally spun out of Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel's global parent company based in San Francisco, and is now headquartered near Madison Square in Manhattan. The firm's namesake is the Valar of J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, who are god-like immortal spirits that chose to enter the mortal world to prepare it for their living creations.
In business, a unicorn is a startup company valued at over US$1 billion which is privately owned and not listed on a share market. The term was first published in 2013, coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, choosing the mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successful ventures.
Social Capital, formerly known as Social+Capital Partnership, is a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California. The firm specializes in technology startups, providing seed funding, venture capital, and private equity.
Brex Inc. is an American financial service and technology company that offers business credit cards and cash management accounts to technology companies. Brex cards are business charge cards, which require at least $50,000 in a bank account if professionally invested, if not with $100,000 to open, and cardholders who default won't damage their personal credit or assets. Emigrant Bank issues the Brex cards.
Arjun Sethi is an American internet entrepreneur, investor and executive. He is co-founder and partner at venture capital firm Tribe Capital. Previously, he was a partner at Social Capital and an executive at Yahoo!, where he launched Yahoo! Livetext. Prior, he was co-founder and CEO of MessageMe and was the CEO of Lolapps, the developer behind Ravenwood Fair. In December 2023, he became Tribe Capital's chairman and CIO.
TCMI, Inc. better known by the name TCV is an American investment firm based in Menlo Park, California. The firm mainly invests in public and private growth-stage companies in the technology industry.
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