In a blog post on Thursday, San Francisco-based fintech company Robinhood announced that it was opening up two new offices: one in Seattle and one in New York City.
This news comes at a time when Robinhood’s growth is skyrocketing. The company created a commission-free stock trading platform that allows people to buy and sell full or fractional shares, ETFs and cryptocurrencies. It saw huge user growth in 2020 thanks in part to the wild swings of the stock market. But even more people signed up to use the platform following a Reddit-fueled stock trading frenzy in January.
This caused Robinhood to quickly raise $3.4 billion in funding to keep up with demand. This is a ton of capital for the company, especially when you consider that it also raised close to $1 billion in funding over the course of 2020.
Adding two new offices in major cities is likely the next step in Robinhood’s growth trajectory. The company said these new offices will help it continue to scale to meet demand, as well as build on its product offering.
The company says that its Seattle office will be “a center of excellence for infrastructure, security and privacy.” Robinhood currently has just two Seattle-based job listings on its website, both for engineering positions. However, the company says it will “hire actively,” so it’s expected to add more jobs in the future. The company also mentions that it’s hiring for product, operations, design, research, marketing, compliance and other key roles.
“Our new offices will enable us to scale to meet our ambitious goals and offer more for our customers,” Robinhood VP of engineering Surabhi Gupta said in the blog post. “We are delighted to join the vibrant New York and Seattle communities and look forward to welcoming more diverse talent with experience spanning finance, technology and beyond.”
Robinhood employees are still working remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and will continue doing so through at least August. The company will start sending employees back to the office in phases when it is safe to do so. It also says it will embrace a distributed workforce model, where some employees work in-person while others work remotely. In the meantime though, the company plans to move forward with its hiring plans for the new offices.
