The Ledger 40 Under 40

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Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt

Banking on Disruption, Palo Alto, USA - 02 Dec 2015
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Ben Margot/AP/REX/Shutterstock (7552747b) Vlad Tenev, Baiju Bhatt Robinhood co-founders Vlad Tenev, left, and Baiju Bhatt pose at company headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. Robinhood is a stock brokerage that does not charge any commissions for its more than 1 million customers to buy and sell shares. "During the next 10 years, we are going to create an international company that will be like nothing the financial services industry has ever seen," says Bhatt Banking on Disruption, Palo Alto, USA - 02 Dec 2015Ben Margot — AP/REX/Shutterstock Ben Margot/AP/REX/Shutterstock
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What if you could buy stocks with your smartphone—and avoid annoying trading charges to boot? That’s how millions of young investors use Robinhood. Bhatt and Tenev, who met as Stanford math whizzes, launched the company in 2013 as an egalitarian challenge to old guard brokerage houses. Five years later, it has shot to a valuation of $5.6 billion. This year they added Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to the trading mix and now hope to build Robinhood into a full-blown digital bank.
(Also No. 24 on the main Fortune 40 Under 40 list.)

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