Crypto Trading App Robinhood Reportedly Seeks $250M After March Outages

Popular stock and cryptocurrency trading app had a lot of problems in March, and is reportedly trying to make up for it with help from a new injection of cash.

According to Bloomberg, Robinhood is in the process of raising $250 million at a valuation of about $8 billion. Citing anonymous sources, the report says the new funding round will be driven by Robinhood’s existing investors, like major venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.

The word is that there’s still no final deal. Cointelegraph contacted Robinhood for comment and didn’t receive an immediate response. We will update this story if they should provide one.

The report also notes that Robinhood has seen record revenue growth during the coronavirus pandemic, up from $20 million in March 2019 to $60 million March 2020. There was a significant surge in new account signups in the midst of market volatility.

The March 2 outage was not the only technical issue experienced by Robinhood that month. On March 9, the platform suffered another system outage, causing downtime for several services on its platform. A group of affected users filed a class action lawsuit against the company on March 25, accusing the platform of leaving its users able to execute trades on securities or change limit orders.

Robinhood’s reported funding could be crucial in winning back the trust of users affected by the company’s outages, as well as handling ongoing legal issues stemming from those outages. As reported, Robinhood started compensating some of its users in mid-March, but declined to say how many users were affected.