Robinhood Ventures Fund II (RVII) began trading on the NYSE today at $25.00 a share, a business development company (BDC) that converts roughly 79 venture-stage startups into exchange-traded stock. The structure is unusual enough on its own: a retail-priced window into early companies with no accredited-investor test. For the chip industry, the more interesting question is what sits inside the fund: a cluster of startups working on AI-driven chip design, semiconductor materials, and compute utilization.
Watch the RVII roadshow.
Underwritten by Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, the deal also sells through Robinhood’s IPO Access at the same $25 price. Nearly every position is a $250K SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity), and most of the portfolio comes from Y Combinator alumni. Technology exposure is roughly 64% of the fund’s assets, and a meaningful share of that is semiconductor-adjacent: businesses attacking how chips get designed, what they are made of, and how much of their compute capacity actually gets used.
Chip-adjacent names in the fund
Visibl Semiconductors uses AI agents to automate the front end of chip design, aiming for faster, lower-cost custom silicon. The startup targets teams that want ASIC-style efficiency without the multi-year design cycles and heavy engineering headcount that bespoke chips usually demand, and its Y Combinator backing fits a fund built around early technical founders.
Matforge applies AI scientists to semiconductor materials discovery, the search for new compounds and process chemistries that keep transistors scaling as node economics strain. Materials work is slow, expensive, and data-rich, which makes it a natural fit for machine-learning-driven search instead of trial-and-error lab runs.
Expanse Compute builds an intelligence layer that finds and unlocks wasted GPU capacity, routing workloads to idle accelerators across fleets. It is not a chipmaker, but its product sits squarely on the AI silicon economy: the more compute the industry packs onto accelerators, the more valuable utilization software becomes.
Where the fund’s semiconductor exposure concentrates
Read together, the three bets trace a single thesis: the software layer around silicon is where early-stage value is forming. Rather than backing fabs or merchant chipmakers, RVII’s chip exposure concentrates on the design phase (Visibl), the materials phase (Matforge), and the utilization phase (Expanse) of the AI silicon cycle, all pre-Series A and all written as $250K SAFEs.
The pattern tracks the industry’s own direction. Chip design is becoming an AI-native workflow, materials discovery is turning into a search problem, and two years of GPU shortages have pushed operators toward squeezing more work out of the accelerators they already own. Those are exactly the problems that migrate from research labs to startups, and from startups into a fund like this one.
What the listing signals for early silicon
The structural point is the vehicle itself. A BDC carries no accredited-investor test, so anyone with a brokerage account can hold a slice of early silicon alongside listed chip giants. RVII charges a 2% management fee and a 20% incentive fee, and a SAFE-based portfolio carries startup-level risk, so it is not a quiet alternative to a semiconductor ETF. It is a genuine first: an exchange-traded vehicle built around pre-Series A chip innovation.
The broader signal is about capital formation. Only about 12.6% of US individuals qualify as accredited investors, and the median time from founding to IPO has stretched from five years in 1999 to fourteen in 2024. With startups taking longer to reach public markets, a listed fund with an explicit Y Combinator pipeline gives retail investors their first direct, tradeable exposure to the earliest silicon bets, and gives chip startups another source of pre-Series A capital with a built-in public exit path.
