This post is cowritten with Renyu Chen and Dev Tagare from Robinhood.
Robinhood has been a pioneer and disruptor in the once staid world of online brokerages. Founded in 2013, the company transformed an industry better known for gatekeeping into an open platform accessible to all. Robinhood pioneered commission-free trading, and harnessed the power of technology and intuitive design to create a seamless and engaging experience for modern investors. To this day, the company continues to disrupt the financial services industry by launching groundbreaking product innovations on AWS.
Such innovations have made Robinhood one of the fastest growing brokerages in history, with more than 25 million customers worldwide and a global reputation as an innovator and technology leader. Fueled by its mission of “democratizing finance for all,” the company’s focus on accessibility, particularly for first-time investors, has kept Robinhood as one of the top finance apps on the Apple App Store for more than a decade and earned Robinhood accolades such as an award from Fast Company magazine as one of World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies. This annual ranking highlights companies that are reshaping industries and culture through innovation.
Robinhood’s Chief Executive Officer, Vlad Tenev, explains why this focus is important to Robinhood:
“Our belief is, the more we lower the barriers to entry, the more we level the playing field and allow people to invest their money at a younger age, the better off our economy will be and the better off society will be.”
Built to operate in the cloud, Robinhood uses AWS to power its online business, deliver and update its mobile trading app, securely store information and data, and perform business analytics. Robinhood recently used AI to improve customer experience and expand accessibility. For example, in 2025, the company will launch Robinhood Cortex, an AI investment tool that is designed to provide real-time insights to help users better navigate markets, identify potential opportunities, and stay up to date on the latest market moving news. Cortex is an exciting step forward, providing a level premium investment and market digests that have historically been reserved for institutional investors and wealthy individuals.
As Robinhood customers are able to do more on the platform, the company is working with AWS to explore new generative AI solutions such as Amazon Nova, a family of foundation models (FMs) that make generative AI development faster and more efficient, with exceptional price performance. These new solutions will help the company accommodate rapid expansion of customer requirements.
In this post, we share how Robinhood delivers democratized finance and real-time market insights using generative AI and Amazon Nova.
An AI/ML journey built on customer obsession
Robinhood, like all financial services firms, operates in a highly regulated environment. Historically, the industry was seen as slow-moving and wary of new technologies. Robinhood’s founders put technology at the forefront by initially building a no-frills, no-fee app that, by design, would make investing accessible to everyone, not just the very wealthy. As Robinhood grew, it attracted a wider variety of customers who need the speed, reliability, security, and low cost the platform offers, but who also want a richer set of services for different and novel use cases.
Robinhood listens closely to these active traders. As Renyu Chen, staff machine learning (ML) engineer at Robinhood, explains,
“We wanted to create a seamless journey for AI/ML applications to go from experimentation to Robinhood scale. We looked to the AWS team to help meet the AI/ML needs of our developers while providing advanced ML tooling to serve our most sophisticated ‘active trader’ customers. This would also require a plug-and-play approach that could adopt the latest generative AI technologies from open source, model providers, and home-grown platform tooling.”
Robinhood explored various generative AI solutions during 2023, concluding that the best way to get to Robinhood scale was with Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that helps users build generative AI models. Amazon Bedrock offers an extensive selection of FMs from various providers, and allows a high level of customization and security through a single API.
According to Robinhood’s Renyu Chen,
“For us, the security of our customers’ data comes first. Nothing is more important. With Amazon Bedrock, data stays under our control. When we query a model, the input and output never leave our virtual private cloud. When we fine-tune a foundation model, it is based on a private copy of that model. This means our customers’ data is not shared with model providers, and is not used to improve the base models.”
To meet the needs of Robinhood’s ever-growing base of power users, Robinhood is exploring Amazon Nova, estimating that 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 such as a fraud investigation assistant, enhanced document processing, and AI-created content generation.
In addition, AWS generative AI solutions working through Amazon Nova can power new agentic workflows for Robinhood, in which autonomous AI agents can independently make decisions, adapt to changing situations, and execute actions.
“Robinhood offers its customers simplicity, speed, security, and cost savings. Working developer-to-developer with the Robinhood team and building together, we can design generative AI solutions that meet Robinhood’s priorities and customer-focused goals. For example, Amazon Nova models can be easily customized with Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation, which ‘distills’ knowledge from a larger, more capable ‘teacher’ model to a smaller, faster, and cost-efficient ‘student’ model. This solution can help Robinhood use models such as DeepSeek to explore exciting new use cases quickly, securely, and at a 75% lower cost than equivalent offerings from competitors.”
– Dushan Tharmal, Principal Product Manager, Amazon Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Amazon Nova: More services, greater value for Robinhood and its customers
Working with AWS on its ambitious AI journey, Robinhood is able to rapidly scale new services for customers without needing the costly structures, staff, and infrastructure found at traditional brokerages. With support from AWS, Robinhood is able to offer a richer customer experience while remaining true to its mission of simplicity, clarity, low cost, speed, security, and reliability.
“We see that Amazon Nova can be a great match for our mission. Amazon Nova offers the lowest latency responses at very low cost, and is accurate and lightning-fast across a wide range of interactive and high-volume Robinhood applications. And, consistent with Robinhood’s commitment to simplicity and low cost for its customers, using Amazon Nova models through Amazon Bedrock makes these large-scale tasks significantly easier, cheaper, and more cost-effective.”
– Dev Tagare, Robinhood’s head of AI.
Learn more about Amazon Nova and how it can deliver frontier intelligence and industry leading price-performance for your organization.
About the authors
Renyu Chen is a Staff AI Engineer at Robinhood Markets
Dev Tagare is the Head of AI at Robinhood Markets
Uchenna Egbe is a GenAI Solutions Architect at AWS FSI,
Trevor Spires is a GenAI Solutions Architect at AWS FinTech.
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