Robinhood, Coinbase and Block laid off staff after adopting AI. Private fintechs aren't doing the same
They say that death comes in threes. So too, it seems, do AI-influenced layoffs from publicly traded fintechs accompanied by a protracted tweet from the CEO. Following reductions at Coinbase and Block, Robinhood has cut 10% of staff, citing a desire to be a "lean, hyper-focused team." It has come somewhat as a surprise.
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AI wasn't explicitly mentioned in the memo about "talent density" from Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, but the fintech has been rapidly adopting the technology. Tenev said on a podcast in July that AI produces more than half the code written at Robinhood today, and that he expects staff to be "executing relentlessly."
Even relentless Robinhood executors seem to have been affected by the cuts. One anonymous employee there on jobs forum Blind said that they stayed up late making a last minute report for their manager "only to wake up this morning and find that I had lost access." Robinhood employees we spoke to said they were unaware of any plans to cut prior to the memo, while Blind users said that Slack accounts for affected users remain active, meaning that employees who survived cannot see who was affected. Employees we spoke to confirmed that Robinhood's compliance department was among the areas impacted, while Blind users posted that engineering staff were also cut. Robinhood declined to comment further than the memo, visible here.
The decision to cut is slightly unusual given that Robinhood has one of the best revenue to employee ratios in fintech, to the point where it highlights this fact in each of its quarterly earnings reports. In 2025, Robinhood made an average of $6.5m per employee, compared to ~$1.5m at Coinbase and ~$2.4m at Block. Robinhood staff might argue they're spread thin but, as Patrick Bateman says, you can always be thinner.
Even more curious, however, is the fact that this phenomenon of AI-driven layoffs doesn't seem to be happening in fintechs that aren't publicly listed. The most notable exception is Bolt, which laid off 30% of staff (including its entire HR team) in April, but Michael Abdul, director of fintech recruitment firm Volition, told us that private fintechs are "not massively" using AI to make cuts. Instead, he said they "use it as a justification not to hire new people, or backfill roles." If a team member leaves, they'll attempt to "use AI to plug that gap." Robinhood seems to be doing this too; it's closing a small number of open roles alongside the cuts.
Public companies have an incentive to cut jobs and to blame it on AI. Both Coinbase and Block experienced stock price pops following their announcements and Robinhood has followed suit, with stock up 10.4% at time of writing. However, while Block's stock price has stayed up since the announcement, Coinbase stock has since plunged over 10%. Robinhood will hope it follows the footsteps of the former.
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