The Information's TITV
00:07:18 · Akash Pasricha, Shiv Verma
[00:07:18] S0: So tell me, other than the advantage that you can trade all these assets in one spot, what is the advantage that you are pitching to customers in terms of why they should trade events contracts on Robinhood compared to Polymarket and and Kalshi? [00:07:37] S1: Yeah. Great. Great question. So a couple different things. One, you mentioned, you can do all your asset classes together. That is a really powerful point for active traders in particular. Two, with our new dynamic pricing, we believe we have the best pricing out there. And so that's really great for customers. The third thing we're bullish on, it relates to the first one, is we are now building event contracts for the equities types market. So for example, we announced KPI options at our Hood Summit a few weeks ago. You can now go in and place an event contract in the very near term on say Apple for example. But you can say the number of iPhones it's gonna ship, how many Duos it's gonna ship, what are revenue, what are EPS. That is something our competitors can't do because it will be a brokerage product. And if you're an active trader and you wanna be able to go between equities or options or crypto or event contracts, Robinhood is gonna be the destination to do it. And so the way we see it is it's making the entire platform better, whether your equities options crypto, and it's a unique advantage that we have relative to many of our peers.
00:07:37 · Shiv Verma, Akash Pasricha
[00:07:37] S1: Yeah. Great. Great question. So a couple different things. One, you mentioned, you can do all your asset classes together. That is a really powerful point for active traders in particular. Two, with our new dynamic pricing, we believe we have the best pricing out there. And so that's really great for customers. The third thing we're bullish on, it relates to the first one, is we are now building event contracts for the equities types market. So for example, we announced KPI options at our Hood Summit a few weeks ago. You can now go in and place an event contract in the very near term on say Apple for example. But you can say the number of iPhones it's gonna ship, how many Duos it's gonna ship, what are revenue, what are EPS. That is something our competitors can't do because it will be a brokerage product. And if you're an active trader and you wanna be able to go between equities or options or crypto or event contracts, Robinhood is gonna be the destination to do it. And so the way we see it is it's making the entire platform better, whether your equities options crypto, and it's a unique advantage that we have relative to many of our peers. [00:08:33] S0: Right. So, okay, we talked about crypto, we talked about prediction markets, so now we have to talk about AI just to complete the trifecta. So remind us now, what agents can you use to trade on Robinhood? What can't you do? What is the suite of what's available?
00:08:52 · Shiv Verma
[00:08:52] S1: Yeah, great question. So we now have Robinhood Agents. We announced this at the Hood Summit. That is where you can natively go into the app and you can ask an agent to trade on your behalf. Earlier in the year, we announced an MCP. So you can connect it to your favorite MCP, whether it's Codex or Claude Code or Grok. And so customers love that. We had about 200,000 customers that are already using it, but what we heard is they wanted to make it more natively in the app. So that's what we announced and now we're rolling it out to customers. Really good adoption. We announced it's already over $250,000,000 of assets on the platform and it's only been around for a few months. What we're seeing is customers right now are primarily using it for research. They're going in and they're saying, Hey, have a view that I'd like to express. I think AI stocks or tech stocks are gonna do well. Can you help me do scanners or screeners? And this is what I'm looking for. We are seeing customers using it to trade as well, but the early adoption has been more research and and focus there. And now what we're building is we're just taking customer feedback, we're iterating it, we're making the in app experience even better and better. We also put a ton of guardrails in place. So first, it's a separate account in the app. So right now, for example, if I open my app, I have a ton of different accounts. Have my investing account, my retirement account, my custodial account for my daughter. I now have an authentic account. That is the only account that your agent can access.
00:10:05 · Akash Pasricha, Shiv Verma, Umesh Padval
[00:10:05] S0: Do do you think... Will will you open it up to, like, you know, external agent, Muse, Instinct, all these other apps? Is that coming? [00:10:14] S1: Oh, yeah. That already exists. If [00:10:15] S0: you Muse. Okay. [00:10:16] S1: If you go to the Grockbox store, you can actually find a Robinhood connector. We are working with Muse to have other connector up in the very, very near term, but absolutely. For us, we believe you should just give customers a choice. We should be available on every single platform, every type of connector. You should also be able to do it in app. It's similar to the Amazon model, selection wins. And so for us, if we give customers a great choice and let them trade, we think it's great for everybody. [00:10:39] S0: So let me ask you about the business model for you then, because we've written about this topic at The Information. I mean, agentic trading is interesting because in a world where you are making at least some money off the spread between the prices that people are buying and selling at, I imagine that agents... And we've seen it with algorithmic trading as well, agents might be better at that. So the spread, the opportunity to make money off that for you guys might be less. How do you see that affecting your financial results then? [00:11:16] S1: Yeah, it's a great question. The way we think about it is if volume goes up and spreads tighten, that's fine. We want to win market share. [00:11:24] S0: Price type of quantity, [00:11:25] S2: got you.
00:11:25 · Umesh Padval, Shiv Verma, Akash Pasricha
[00:11:25] S2: got you. [00:11:25] S1: Exactly. You give customers a great experience, and the agents are trading more, and they have awesome execution, that's fantastic. And if it brings spreads tighter, so be it. We will never ever try to do something to change that. And so we've done this over and over and over again. I mean, before Robinhood came here, commissions were $10 Now, as I mentioned, it's it's 1.2¢ per $100 trader on the rebate. If that goes lower, but the overall pie is bigger and customers are getting a fantastic experience, we call that a win win. [00:11:55] S0: Okay. And last question for you, Shiv. So you you said 14 businesses over a $100,000,000. What's gonna be the fifteenth? [00:12:02] S1: Oh, a couple competitors. We actually have an internal debate for what it's gonna be. So we have some of our futures business that's scaling nicely. Index Options is scaling really nicely. Robinhood Ventures, one that's near and dear to my heart, that's starting to scale nicely. The Robinhood chain, as I mentioned, it did 50,000,000 of gross, about 25,000,000 of net. It's early, so we didn't call it a cylinder yet. So if I come back on in a quarter or two, I'm hoping that we might have another cylinder for you.
00:12:02 · Shiv Verma, Akash Pasricha
[00:12:02] S1: Oh, a couple competitors. We actually have an internal debate for what it's gonna be. So we have some of our futures business that's scaling nicely. Index Options is scaling really nicely. Robinhood Ventures, one that's near and dear to my heart, that's starting to scale nicely. The Robinhood chain, as I mentioned, it did 50,000,000 of gross, about 25,000,000 of net. It's early, so we didn't call it a cylinder yet. So if I come back on in a quarter or two, I'm hoping that we might have another cylinder for you. [00:12:28] S0: Great. Okay. Well, Shiv, thanks for coming on. That is Shiv Verma, the CFO of Robinhood here on TITV. TPUs are taking center stage for Google right now. The Information has exclusive reporting that OpenAI, a Longtime Nvidia customer, is planning to buy Google's rival TPU chips. That scoop came the same day that Oracle said that it will also make TPUs available to its cloud customers. For more analysis, I want to bring on Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures, and Ben Pouladian, Founder and CEO of BEP Research. Gentlemen, welcome to you both. It is great to have you both back. Ben, I want to start with you. So why are Oracle and OpenAI turning to TPUs right now?