Google Exec Joins Robinhood As Chief Product Officer

Aparna Chennapragada, a 12-year Google veteran, will now be working with Robinhood as chief product officer, according to a Wednesday (March 17) post on its company blog.

In this position, she’ll be tasked with overseeing product, design and research.

The blog post said her leadership “will help us continue to build products that make finance more accessible and meet the needs of a new generation of investors.”

“Robinhood has built a uniquely accessible product that has opened up the financial markets to millions of people,” said Chennapragada, per the post. “I spent my career at Google building products that help billions of people in their everyday lives. So I couldn’t be more excited to join Robinhood and help more people build their financial future and personal wealth.”

At Google, Chennapragada was in charge of product, engineering and design teams across Google Search. Recently she was vice president for consumer shopping and the lead for AR and visual search products.

Robinhood CEO and Co-founder Vlad Tenev said he had been “immediately struck by her passion for our product and delivering exceptional value to our customers” and that he looked forward to working with her to “build delightful product experiences and work towards democratizing finance for all.”

Robinhood, which grew in popularity over the pandemic as people found ways to occupy their time while quarantined, plans to go public on the Nasdaq exchange, according to reports.

Users were drawn to Robinhood’s low trading costs and game-like interface.

It’s still unclear if the brokerage app will go public with a direct listing or utilize a traditional initial public offering (IPO).

The investor interest in Robinhood appears to have overcome the company’s chaotic beginning of the year. Then, as hordes of retail investors rushed to raise the prices of “meme apps” like GameStop and AMC, Robinhood said it had to stop trading on some of those apps to right the market. That caused some uproar in late January and early February, along with buzz from both sides of Congress.