Robinhood Co-Founder and Co-CEO Baiju Bhatt. Photo credit: TechCrunch, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Robinhood, the popular stock trading app, has begun seeking banks for a role in a planned initial public offering that could happen as soon as next year, according to a report [paywalled] from Bloomberg which cites “people with knowledge of the matter”. Bloomberg reports that Robinhood is aiming to go public as soon as in the first quarter of next year.

An imminent Robinhood IPO wouldn’t be surprising given the company has raised some $2.2 billion in funding from a large group of investors who likely have their eyes set on an exit via the public markets. Robinhood’s most recent funding round happened in September and placed its valuation at $11.7 billion.

Over the past year, Robinhood has experienced extraordinary growth and added 3 million new accounts at the beginning of this year alone. The company now has 13 million accounts registered on its platform, compared to 6 million two years ago. The coronavirus pandemic experience widely drove up retail trading activity in the US and thus saw Robinhood as a major beneficiary of its rise.

Targeted at millennials, Robinhood is now one of the biggest online brokerages in the US. The company has, however, not been without issues, a notable one being regular outages during heightened trading activity earlier this year. It’s such that U.S. consumer protection agencies received over 400 complaints about Robinhood in the first half of this year, a much higher rate compared to competing firms such as Fidelity and Charles Schwab.

Also, Robinhood was subject to recent hacking activity that saw about 2,000 accounts compromised.

Robinhood is backed by a handful of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, among them DST Global, Sequoia Capital, D1 Capital Partners, IVP, and Andreessen Horowitz. The company’s host of big-name investors are likely looking forward to big paydays from its IPO.

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