Free stock-trading app maker Robinhood Market Inc. said today it has raised $280 million in a new late-stage funding on an $8.3 billion valuation to allow it to invest in scaling up its platform.

The Series F round was led by Sequoia Capital and included NEA, Ribbit Capital, 9Yards Capital and Unusual Ventures. Reports of the round surfaced back on April 15.

Founded in 2013, Robinhood rose to fame by offering the first and now the most popular zero-fee stock trading app, often cited as beloved by millennials. The company first started offering a web-based service in November 2017 before adding support for cryptocurrency trading in January 2018.

That Robinhood is using its new funding to invest in scalability does not come as a surprise given some of its ongoing issues. Robinhood’s app went offline March 2 during a record surge in the Dow Jones following the first coronavirus-related crash. Despite promising customers that it had fixed its systems and it wouldn’t happen again, the app was also down the following day. Forward to March 9 and the app went down yet again on a day the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its single biggest point drop in history.

Robinhood’s 10 million users were not impressed given that they had potentially lost millions in not being able to trade during those times. Shareholders Foundation Inc. announced April 13 that it had lodged a class action lawsuit on behalf of customers affected by the outages, saying in the lawsuit that ” the outages caused users to miss out on some of the then-biggest highest single-day market gains in recorded history and that Robinhood should have provided a financial services platform that would have been robust enough to handle that trading volume and should have had a backup system to handle such outage.”

Robinhood glosses over its issues, saying only that it remains “focused on continuously improving the experience we provide.”

Including the new funding, Robinhood has raised $1.2 billion to date. The company has long been reported to be looking to go public, although given current market sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic and its new round, Robinhood’s plans are likely on hold.

PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor predicted in April that volatility stemming from the pandemic is expected to remain through the rest of the year as the initial public offering window for private businesses is linked to conditions in the public market. Notably, there were only 13 VC-backed IPOs following the global financial crisis in 2008 and 11 in 2009.

Photo: Robinhood