Robinhood Ventures Fund II hit the New York Stock Exchange on Aug 13, trading as RVII at $25.00 a share and handing retail investors a rare direct stake in early-stage startups. The closed-end business development company holds roughly 79 companies bought largely through $250K SAFEs, with a portfolio tilted hard toward Y Combinator alumni. For security teams, the listing is worth reading as a signal: the fund’s security-adjacent corner maps where venture capital expects the next wave of breaches, and the defenses built against them, to come from.
Watch the RVII roadshow.
Because RVII trades like a stock, anyone can buy in without passing the accredited investor test that normally gates private venture exposure. The structure also forces disclosure, so the SEC filings expose a portfolio that would otherwise stay private. The security cohort spans AI runtime protection, identity and fraud tooling, web and API defense, product compliance, and counter-drone software, a spread that says more about the threat landscape than any single company news cycle.
The fund’s security cohort
Silmaril Security is building runtime security for self-improving AI, the class of systems that rewrite their own code and behavior as they operate. Because those models outrun signature-based defenses, Silmaril watches the execution environment itself and intervenes when an agent drifts outside its guardrails, an approach aimed at the agent economy rather than today’s malware ecosystem.
On the identity side, Didit builds identity verification and fraud infrastructure designed to replace brittle document checks. Its stack pairs biometric and document verification with fraud scoring that targets synthetic identities before they clear onboarding, a category of abuse that has cost financial institutions billions. For a fund anchored in brokerage, keeping bad actors out of newly opened accounts is foundational infrastructure.
Crosslayer Labs defends the internet presence layer, protecting and monitoring websites and APIs against abuse, scraping, and supply-chain tampering. Complir rounds out the compliance corner with AI-powered tools that help manufacturers prove physical products meet regulatory and safety standards before they ship, closing the gap between code security and the hardware that runs on real-world networks.
Counter-drone defense claims two portfolio slots. Surtr Defense builds a hardware-agnostic operating system for drone defense, letting operators run detection and countermeasure workflows across sensors and effectors from different vendors. DroneTector, the small-drone detection and tracking arm of Milliray, focuses on finding and following unauthorized aircraft around critical infrastructure, airports, and event perimeters.
AI security and identity lead the corner
Look across the cohort and two themes dominate. AI security appears twice over, with Silmaril protecting self-improving systems and Crosslayer defending the web and API surface those systems increasingly depend on. Identity and fraud tooling anchors the fund’s brokerage thesis, where verification failures carry regulatory weight on both sides of the Atlantic. Product compliance and counter-drone bets sit at the edges, but the core is defense for software that writes itself and the accounts it touches.
What the listing signals
The bigger story is the channel. RVII gives retail money a liquid path into pre-Series A security startups, the companies too young for conventional public markets and too small for most institutional mandates. A listed vehicle that marks these positions to market each day also puts a public price on early security technology, something the industry has never really had. For founders, it is a new exit and fundraising option; for buyers of security tools, it is a map of where the next generation of vendors will come from.
None of this means the fund’s bets will pay off. BDCs charge meaningful fees, startup failure rates are high, and a $250K SAFE in a 79-company portfolio is a small stake in a long game. But as a window into how venture capital thinks about the security landscape, RVII is the most transparent look retail investors have ever had.
