Retail investors are famously locked out of the startup world. Robinhood is attempting to change that by allowing the general public to invest in a portfolio of what it calls “some of the most exciting private companies operating today.”

To do this, the company that pioneered the commission-free brokerage model has secured access to eight startups—including Databricks, Stripe, Mercor, and Oura—grouping them into a vehicle called Robinhood Ventures Fund I. The fund, which also includes Ramp, Airwallex, Revolut, and Boom, set out last month with an ambitious $1 billion target, but demand for this novel way of investing in private companies was lower than expected.

On Thursday, Robinhood announced the fund had raised $658.4 million — which could reach $705.7 million if underwriters exercise their full allotment. The shares, priced at $25 in the offering, began trading on Friday and closed the day at $21, a 16% decline.

RVI’s reception on Wall Street stands in stark contrast to another attempt to give individual investors exposure to buzzy startups. When Destiny Tech100 — a publicly traded, closed-end fund holding stakes in 100 venture-backed companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, and Discord — direct-listed on the NYSE in March 2024, its shares surged from a reference price of $4.84 to an opening trade of $8.25, eventually closing its first day at $9.00.

Destiny Tech100 has kept climbing since its public debut. The fund closed trading on Friday at $26.61, a 33% premium to its net asset value of $19.97, meaning its shares trade well above the actual value of its underlying holdings.

So what explains why retail investors aren’t nearly as excited about Robinhood’s fund as they are about Destiny Tech 100? The most likely explanation is RVI’s lack of exposure to the companies widely expected to go public at enormous valuations: OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX.

Robinhood is looking to address this. RVI intends to add more startups to the fund, eventually aiming to hold what Robinhood Ventures President Sarah Pinto described to TechCrunch as “15 to 20 of the best late-stage growth companies out there.”  The company’s CFO, Shiv Verma, told Axios Pro on Friday that Robinhood is eyeing exposure to OpenAI.

But securing access to these high-profile companies is far from straightforward. Robinhood is aiming to get directly onto their cap tables directly through primary capital raises or secondary share sales — and that’s difficult even for a firm with deep roots in Silicon Valley.

A cap table — the official record of who owns equity in a company — is closely guarded at most high-profile startups, and winning a spot on one requires either being invited by the company or purchasing shares from existing investors with the company’s blessing.

“It’s very difficult to get into any of these companies, and the investment rounds are very expensive,” acknowledged Pinto.

That is just one of the reasons democratizing private markets is easier said than done, and why the companies most retail investors actually want to own remain, for now, out of reach.

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San Francisco startup Anthropic continues to ship new AI products and services at a blistering pace, despite a messy ongoing dispute with the U.S. Department of War.

Today, the company announced Claude Marketplace, a new offering that lets enterprises with an existing Anthropic spend commitment apply part of it toward tools and applications powered by Anthropic’s Claude models but made and offered by external partners including GitLab, Harvey, Lovable, Replit, Rogo and Snowflake.

According to Anthropic’s Claude Marketplace FAQ, the program is designed to simplify procurement and consolidate AI spend. Anthropic says the Marketplace is now in limited preview and that enterprises interested in using it should reach out to their Anthropic account team to get started.

For customers interested in the Marketplace, Anthropic says purchases made through it “count against a portion of your existing Anthropic commitment,” and that the company will manage invoicing for partner spend — meaning enterprises can use part of their existing Anthropic commitment to buy Claude-powered partner solutions without separately handling partner invoicing.

In effect, Anthropic is positioning Claude Marketplace as a more centralized way for enterprises to procure certain Claude-powered partner tools.

Yet, the whole point of Anthropic’s Claude Code and Claude Cowork applications for many users was that they could shift enterprise spend and time away from current third-party software-as-a-service (Saas) apps and instead, they could “vibe code” new solutions or bespoke, AI-powered workflows. This idea is so pervasive that prior Claude integrations have on several recent occasions caused a major selloff in SaaS stocks after investors thought Claude could threaten the underlying companies and applications.

Claude Marketplace seems to be pushing against that idea, suggesting current SaaS apps are still valuable and perhaps even more useful and appealing to enterprises with Claude integrated into them.

The launch raises a broader question about how enterprises will choose to use Claude: directly through Anthropic’s own products and APIs, or through third-party applications that embed Claude for more specialized workflows.

Tool integration

Model and chat platforms have always sought to offer integrations, aiming to cut the time users spend building their app versions. 

OpenAI added third-party apps into ChatGPT and launched a new App Directory in December 2025. This brought in offerings from companies such as Canva, Expedia and Figma that users can invoke by using “@” mentions while prompting on the chatbot.

However, three months in, it’s unclear exactly how many people use ChatGPT Apps, particularly in enterprises — will Claude’s Marketplace be able achieve more success here, given rising enterprise adoption of Claude and Anthropic products?

ChatGPT’s focus in its integrated apps was on retail and individual consumer-focused tasks rather than the enterprise more broadly, but the company has also tried to appeal to that market with new plugins for ChatGPT released alongside its new GPT-5.4 this week.

Other AI tool marketplaces have also cropped up. Lightning AI launched an AI Hub last year following similar moves from AWS and Hugging Face. Many AI marketplaces, such as Salesforce’s, focus on surfacing AI agents that may already have the capabilities customers need. 

How does Anthropic’s solution stand out from these? Asked for comment a spokesperson responded:

“Claude is a model — it reasons, writes, analyzes, and codes. But Harvey isn’t just Claude with a legal prompt. It’s a purpose-built platform built for how legal teams actually work — with the domain expertise, workflow integrations, compliance infrastructure, and institutional knowledge that enterprises require. Same with Rogo for finance, Snowflake for enterprise data, or GitLab for software development. These partners have spent years building the product layer on top of Claude that makes it useful for specific industries and workflows.

That’s actually the point. Thousands of businesses use Claude to power their products — and the best ones have built something Claude alone can’t replicate. Claude Marketplace isn’t Anthropic trying to replace those products. It’s Anthropic investing in them — making it easier for enterprises to access the best Claude-powered tools without managing a separate procurement process for each one. Claude is the intelligence layer. Our partners are the product.”

Native vs app

Enterprise users adapted their Claude or ChatGPT platforms to recognize preferences, connect to their data sources and retain context. So much of how people use enterprise AI these days focuses on customizability, on making the system work for their needs.

Platforms like OpenClaw also allowed people to set up autonomous agents that can have full access to their computers to complete tasks and execute workflows. In other words, Claude and other platforms can already do much of the work that these new third-party Marketplace tools enable — provided they have the right context and data. 

However, third-party tools and integrations allow enterprise users to avoid doing the work themselves and instead invoke an existing tool to handle it. For those whose businesses are built around specific, tool-based workflows, the Marketplace may be exactly the right AI integration for them. In addition, there’s also a good chance that enterprises already paying for Claude may now take advantage of the new Marketplace to explore third-party tools and services they wouldn’t have otherwise.

While it’s still unclear what Claude Marketplace would look like in action, it’s possible that, with these tools, enterprises could use Claude as an orchestrator, where the platform acts as a command center that taps the right tool and accesses the right context without constantly prompting. 

Observers noted that Claude Marketplace offers enterprises a way to “pre-approve” apps, bypassing the often long and cautious approval process. 

Some people noted that Anthropic’s move tracks with how many businesses will want to work directly with the platforms without requiring users to move to their separate offerings. 

Anthropic’s biggest challenge with Claude Marketplace, however, is adoption. Many of the partners for its launch already have enterprise customers who deploy their tools through an API or already connect via MCP or other protocols for context.

Some users may have already vibe-coded apps that tap into these integrations. It’s now a matter of enterprise users showing they want to use these new tools within their Claude workflows.

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over assorted beverages to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.

In the news, we’ve launched a brand-new contest! Yes, the Green-Powered Challenge is underway, and we need your entry to truly make it a contest. You have until April 24th to enter, so show us what you can do with power you scrounge up from the environment around you!

On What’s That Sound, Kristina was leaning toward some kind of distant typing sounds, but [Konrad] knew it was our own Tom Nardi’s steam heat radiator pinging away.

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with an exploration of all the gross security vulnerabilities in a cheap WiFi extender, and we take a look inside a little black and white pay television like you’d find in a Greyhound station in the 80s and 90s.

We also discuss the idea of mixing custom spray paint colors on the fly, a pen clip that never bends out of shape, and running video through a guitar effects pedal. Finally, we discuss climate engineering with disintegrating satellites, and the curse of everything device.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.

Episode 360 Show Notes:

News:

What’s that Sound?

• Congrats to [Konrad] who knew this was Tom Nardi’s radiator!

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
• Kristina’s Picks:

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Vivo revealed its new X300 Ultra phone at MWC
• The device comes with a 400mm telephoto lens accessory
• But the leaked Oppo Find X9 Ultra could soon be a strong rival

When people talk about the best camera phones, they usually have something like Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro Max or Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra in mind — you know, a normal-looking phone with an advanced-yet-unobtrusive camera system on the back. Well, the Vivo X300 Ultra is about to blow all of those expectations away.

Revealed at MWC 2026, Vivo says this device is equipped with a 200-megapixel lens, matching that of last year’s X200 Ultra. But what really catches the eye is the optional 400mm-equivalent Telephoto Extender Gen2 Ultra. This is a clip-on lens made by Zeiss that adds serious zoom capabilities to the phone.

The funding will be used to expand Evervault’s encryption infrastructure, invest in product development, and grow its engineering and product teams.

Evervault, a data encryption start-up founded by Irishman Shane Curran, has raised $25m in Series B funding.

The round was led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Next Play Ventures and new investors including Operator Partners. The new round brings the start-up’s total funding to date to $46m.

Evervault builds developer infrastructure to collect, process and share sensitive data.

The New York and Dublin-based company helps businesses to encrypt and orchestrate sensitive data without ever handling it in plaintext.

“Most compliance frameworks assume sensitive data will exist in plaintext somewhere, but with automated, high-velocity data exchange, that’s a liability,” said Curran, who is also CEO of the company.

“At Evervault, we believe sensitive data should be treated like hazardous material. Systems must be designed so it isn’t touched in the first place.”

Evervault has initially focused on card payments security with a solution that combines encryption with 3D-Secure authentication, network tokens and card data enrichment in a single integration, along with streamlining payment card industry (PCI) compliance.

The company claimed that on average, its solution helps customers cut PCI data security standard compliance costs by $100,000, achieve compliance 95pc faster and ship secure payment systems “in days rather than weeks”.

The start-up said that since its establishment, it has processed more than $5bn in transaction volume and secured more than four times year-over-year revenue growth.

“Our mission isn’t just about payments,” said Curran in a blogpost announcing the raise yesterday (5 March). “We’re building the trust layer for the internet: a global clearinghouse for sensitive data. A place where companies can share, enrich and route information without taking custody of it. We’re replacing contractual trust with cryptographic guarantees.”

The new funding will be used to expand Evervault’s encryption infrastructure, invest in product development, and grow its engineering and product teams, according to the start-up.

Founded in Dublin in 2019, Evervault’s roots can be traced back to the 2017 BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition where Curran took home the top prize for his project qCrypt, which was a quantum-secure, encrypted data storage solution with multi-jurisdictional quorum sharing.

Two years later, Evervault secured $3.2m in seed funding, before going on to raise $16m in Series A funding.

Curran previously spoke to SiliconRepublic.com’s Ann O’Dea at a Future Human pop-up event in 2020, where he discussed his experience as a young entrepreneur and the Irish business contingent in Silicon Valley.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Netflix’s library of streamable party games is expanding today with a custom version of Overcooked! All You Can Eat. Netflix launched its cloud gaming program with games like Lego Party and Tetris Time Warp, but Overcooked feels a bit unique because it features a roster of Netflix-affiliated characters from KPop Demon Hunters and Stranger Things.

For the uninitiated, Overcooked plays like a more manic version of Diner Dash, where teams attempt to prepare food together in increasingly elaborate kitchens filled with obstacles. The original version of Overcooked! All You Can Eat was released in 2020, and includes DLC and stages from previous versions of the game. Netflix’s version bundles in the same content, and “10 Netflix celebrity chefs” including “Dustin, Eleven, Lucas, and the Demogorgon from Stranger Things,” and “half-dozen faces from KPop Demon Hunters,” like “Mira, Rumi, Zoey, Jinu, Derpy and Sussie.” Like Netflix’s other streaming games, playing Overcooked also requires you to use a connected smartphone as a controller.

Offering a growing library of streaming games is part of Netflix’s new strategy under Alan Tascan, a former executive from Epic Games. Tascan took over as Netflix’s President of Games in 2024, and appeared to start revamping the company’s plans not long after, cancelling the release of several mobile games and reportedly shutting down its AAA game studio. Netflix is also continuing to adapt video games into content for its platform. For example, A24 is reportedly developing a game show based on Overcooked for the streaming service.

As part of a Year in Review blog detailing changes Valve made to Steam in 2025, the company shared a minor update on its hardware plans that doesn’t sound good for anyone hoping to buy a Steam Machine, Steam Controller or Steam Frame in 2026. Specifically, the company is now opening up the possibility its new hardware won’t ship this year at all.

In February, when Valve acknowledged the ongoing memory and storage shortage had delayed the launch of its hardware and could lead to higher prices, the company was still committing to a (fairly wide) window of when its hardware would ship:

“Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed. But we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change.”

As of the company’s latest post, however, things somehow sound even less certain. “We hope to ship in 2026, but as we shared recently, memory and storage shortages have created challenges for us,” Valve wrote in its Year in Review post. “We’ll share updates publicly when we finalize our plans!”

While Valve’s air of secrecy can make it easy to read too much into the limited information the company does share, moving from “the first half of the year” to “[hoping] to ship in 2026” certainly gives it wiggle room to not release new hardware this year. And considering the difficulties other companies are facing sourcing memory and storage, it wouldn’t be all that surprising.

HP said in February that RAM accounts for a third of its PC costs, and industry analysts expect the RAM shortage could radically alter the PC landscape as companies are forced to raise prices. Valve’s already struggling to keep the Steam Deck in stock due to its issues securing RAM, it stands to reason sourcing components for even more devices wouldn’t make that process any easier. Then again, the company hasn’t updated its launch timing FAQ, so there’s still reason to hope the Steam Machine ships in 2026.