Baiju Bhatt

Baiju Bhatt was the co-founder and former President of Robinhood Markets, partnering with Vlad Tenev to build the zero-commission trading platform in 2013. His defining founding philosophy was that the financial system's complexity and high fees were intentional barriers designed to extract wealth from the middle class, a belief that led him to design Robinhood's minimalist, jargon-free user interface and its viral, referral-driven growth engine, creating a behavioral lock-in that transformed casual users into high-frequency traders.

Baiju Bhatt (born 1985) is a brilliant software engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Robinhood Markets with Vlad Tenev, driven by a shared conviction that the financial markets should be accessible, transparent, and free for everyone. Born in India, Bhatt moved to the United States for his education, attending Stanford University where he specialized in computer science and built early trading algorithms. Bhatt was the primary architect of Robinhood's proprietary, cloud-native technology stack and its gamified, mobile-first user interface, which utilized confetti animations, push notifications, and simplified language to trigger the same dopamine responses as social media apps. His technical brilliance and focus on user experience allowed Robinhood to scale to millions of users with a fraction of the operational costs of legacy brokerages. Although Bhatt left the company in 2022 to pursue other ventures, his foundational contributions to Robinhood's technology infrastructure and product design laid the groundwork for the company's massive success and its ability to generate $2.97 billion in annual revenue.