How Robinhood and Chime raised $2B+ in the last year

Last night Robinhood, the American fintech unicorn that provides free securities trading services to consumers via an app, announced that it raised an additional $460 million in its previously-known Series G. That round is now worth $660 million at an $11.7 billion post-money valuation.

A little over a month ago Robinhood announced that it had raised a $200 million Series G, bringing its valuation to $11.2 billion at the time.

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The company previously raised a two-part Series F this year, worth $600 million, bringing its total capital raised to well north of the $1 billion mark for the year.

But Robinhood is not alone in posting such epic fundraising numbers.

American neobank Chime rode the pandemic-induced general savings-and-investing boom, raising a $485 million Series F a few days ago. That round came less than a year after Chime had raised a mammoth Series E last December.

Two different American fintech giants each raised more than $1 billion in under a year. That’s quite the feat. This morning as a refresher for us both, we’re going over what we know about recent growth from each company, as those metrics should help us understand why the two former startups are worth so damn much money.

Growth

We begin with Chime, which raised back in December of 2019. Around that time there were a grip of stories written about the company that included estimates of its revenue scale in the year:

• CNBC said Chime’s revenue would come in around $300 million in 2019. Forbes had the number at $200 million.
• Business Insider reported that Chime anticipated revenues of $200 million for the year.

The CNBC number was the last to be reported, meaning that was probably the most accurate. But each included lots of growth. The $200 million revenue figure was still a quadrupling compared to Chime’s 2018 result, according to the same Forbes story.