Within the once-stifling realm of internet brokerages, Robinhood has been a trailblazer and innovator. The startup, which was founded in 2013, changed a gatekeeping-focused sector into one that is open to everyone. In addition to being the first company to offer commission-free trading, Robinhood used technology and user-friendly design to make investing easy and fun for contemporary investors. By introducing ground-breaking product innovations, the business is still upending the financial services sector.
With more than 25 million clients globally and a reputation as a leader in technology and innovation, these advancements have made Robinhood one of the brokerages with the quickest rate of growth in history. Driven by its goal of “democratizing finance for all,” the company’s emphasis on accessibility, especially for novice investors, has kept Robinhood among the top finance apps on the Apple App Store for over ten years. It has also garnered recognition from Fast Company magazine, which named it one of the 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World. Companies that are using innovation to change sectors and cultures are highlighted in this annual list.
Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood, discusses the significance of this focus for the company:
“We think that our economy and society will be better off the more we improve entry barriers, level the playing field, and enable people to invest their money at a younger age.”
This was designed to run in the cloud, to power its online operations, deploy and update its mobile trading app, store data and information securely, and do business analytics. AI was recently deployed by Robinhood to increase accessibility and enhance the client experience. In 2025, for instance, the business will introduce Robinhood Cortex, an AI investment tool that will give consumers real-time insights to help them better navigate markets, spot possible opportunities, and keep up with the most recent news about market movements. With its level premium investment and market digests that were previously only available to institutional investors and affluent individuals, Cortex represents an intriguing advancement.
As users of the platform can do more, Robinhood is collaborating to investigate new generative AI solutions, like Amazon Nova, a family of foundation models (FMs) that offer remarkable pricing performance and speed for generative AI development. The organization will be able to meet the rapidly growing needs of its customers with the aid of these innovative solutions.
In this article, we describe how Robinhood uses Amazon Nova and generative AI to provide real-time market information and democratized finance.
An AI/ML Adventure Fueled By A Passion For Customers
Like all financial services companies, Robinhood works in a highly regulated setting. In the past, the sector was thought to be cautious of new technologies and slow-moving. By first creating a simple, cost-free software, Robinhood’s founders put technology at the forefront and intended to make investing accessible to everyone, not just the very affluent. As Robinhood expanded, it drew in a broader range of users who require the platform’s speed, dependability, security, and affordability while simultaneously desiring a more comprehensive range of services for unique and varied use cases.
These active traders receive a lot of attention from Robinhood. According to Robinhood’s staff machine learning (ML) engineer, Renyu Chen,
Our goal was to make the transition from experimentation to Robinhood scale for AI/ML applications smooth. We turned to the AWS team to help us satisfy our developers’ AI/ML needs while offering our most advanced “active trader” customers cutting-edge ML tools. Additionally, this would necessitate a plug-and-play strategy that could incorporate the newest generative AI technologies from model suppliers, open source, and in-house platform tools.
In 2023, Robinhood investigated a number of generative AI options before determining that Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that assists users in creating generative AI models, was the most effective means of achieving Robinhood scale. With a single API, Amazon Bedrock provides a high degree of customization and security while providing a wide range of FMs from different vendors.
Renyu Chen of Robinhood claims that “The protection of our clients’ data is our top priority. There is nothing more crucial. We maintain control over the data with Amazon Bedrock. The input and output of a model query never leave our virtual private cloud. We use a private copy of the foundation model as the basis for fine-tuning. This implies that model providers do not have access to our customers’ data, nor is it utilized to enhance the base models.
The price per token using Amazon Nova can be up to 80% lower than other models they have tested, which would make it cost-effective to power new high-demand use cases like enhanced document processing, AI-created content generation, and a fraud investigation assistant. Robinhood is investigating Amazon Nova in order to meet the needs of its constantly expanding base of power users.
Furthermore, new agentic processes for Robinhood that enable autonomous AI agents to make decisions, adjust to changing circumstances, and carry out activities on their own can be powered by generative AI solutions via Amazon Nova.
“Robinhood provides its clients with cost savings, quickness, security, and ease of use. We can create generative AI solutions that satisfy Robinhood’s priorities and customer-focused objectives by collaborating and working developer-to-developer with the Robinhood team. For instance, Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation, which “distills” knowledge from a bigger, more capable “teacher” model to a smaller, quicker, and more economical “student” model, makes it simple to customize Amazon Nova models. Compared to comparable products from rivals, this solution can assist Robinhood in using models like DeepSeek to swiftly, securely, and affordably investigate intriguing new use cases.
— Amazon Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Principal Product Manager Dushan Tharmal.
Expanding Services And Value For Robinhood With Amazon Nova
By partnering with AWS on its ambitious AI journey, Robinhood can quickly scale new services for clients without requiring the expensive equipment, personnel, and processes that are typical of traditional brokerages. It enables Robinhood to provide a more comprehensive consumer experience while upholding its core values of dependability, simplicity, clarity, affordability, speed, and security.
“We believe Amazon Nova might be a fantastic fit for our goal. Across a variety of interactive and high-volume Robinhood applications, Amazon Nova provides the lowest latency replies at extremely cheap cost, and it is accurate and lightning-fast. Additionally, employing Amazon Nova models through Amazon Bedrock makes these large-scale activities much simpler, less expensive, and more cost-effective—all of which are consistent with Robinhood’s dedication to simplicity and low cost for its consumers.
Robinhood’s head of AI, Dev Tagare.