Engineers at the stock trading and investing app Robinhood are using AI to generate new code instead of writing it themselves.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said on the 20VC podcast earlier this week that “close to 100%” of software engineers at the company are using AI to write blocks of code, tapping into tools like Cursor and Windsurf, which advertise advanced coding, debugging, and editing capabilities. According to Tenev, over 50% of new code at Robinhood is AI-generated, the same percentage as Salesforce.
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Tenev said that it was difficult to differentiate between AI-written code and human-created code, estimating that only a “minority” of new code at Robinhood was now written by humans.
“It’s hard to even determine what the human-generated code is,” Tenev said on the podcast. “If I had to guess, it’s in the minority.”
Meanwhile, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have individually stated that AI writes 30% of the code at their respective companies, putting Robinhood’s AI coding adoption ahead of those big tech companies.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev. Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize
Tenev also said on the podcast that AI has had a “huge” impact on Robinhood internally, affecting teams like customer support. For example, Robinhood built its own version of ChatGPT for customer service.
“The impact that it’s had on internal teams, ranging from software engineering to customer support, the really big internal teams, has been huge,” Tenev said on the podcast.
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Robinhood has more than quadrupled its market capitalization in the past eight months, from $21 billion in November to about $90 billion at the time of writing. In 2024, the company achieved total net revenue of $2.95 billion, up 58% year-over-year.
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