Robinhood Markets Inc. has opened a new headquarters in downtown Toronto and pushed its Canadian headcount past 200 employees, an expansion that comes three months after the U.S. trading platform cut a tenth of its global workforce.
The company announced the new office on Sept. 16, according to a statement from Robinhood Canada, saying the space has capacity for nearly double its current Canadian staff, up to about 400 people. Johann Kerbrat, senior vice-president and general manager of Robinhood Crypto and International, called the opening “a milestone for Robinhood” and said the company wants “to bring more products to Canada.” Chris Pollock, general manager of Robinhood Canada, said the company’s focus remains on “competitive products and transparent services.”
Ontario Economic Development Minister Vic Fedeli welcomed the expansion, saying in a statement the province looks forward to “Robinhood’s growing presence in Toronto.”
The buildout follows Robinhood’s roughly $250-million, all-cash acquisition of Toronto-based WonderFi Technologies Inc., first announced in May 2025 and closed in June 2026 after several delays tied to regulatory reviews under the Competition Act and Canadian securities regulators. The deal gave Robinhood control of WonderFi’s Bitbuy and Coinsquare crypto exchanges, which served more than 300,000 Canadian customers, along with Coinsquare Capital Markets Ltd.’s registration as an investment dealer with the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization, the licence Robinhood is now using to operate in Canada. WonderFi’s chief executive, Dean Skurka, left the company after the deal closed.
Robinhood Canada launched its own trading app July 1, offering more than 50 cryptocurrencies with funding through Interac e-transfers, wire transfers and native Canadian-dollar pairs. Trading fees run between 0.5 and 1.85 per cent, which Robinhood has positioned against Wealthsimple’s 2 per cent fee on crypto accounts under $100,000. The company is running a zero-fee promotion through Sept. 30 and has said it plans to add stock trading and other self-directed investing products beyond crypto.
The pace of that migration tells a more complicated story than the opening suggests. As of mid-September, Robinhood had invited about 160,000 former WonderFi customers to move their accounts onto the new platform, and roughly 25,000, about one in six, had completed the switch, according to company figures. Bitbuy and Coinsquare continue operating as separate platforms in the meantime, meaning most of the customer base Robinhood paid $250 million for has yet to actually use the product the new Toronto office was built to support.
The bigger tension is timing. Robinhood laid off about 290 employees, 10 per cent of its full-time workforce, in June, a move chief executive Vlad Tenev said came “from a position of business strength” rather than financial distress, pointing to record trading volumes in equities, options and prediction markets that month. The company booked about $20 million in cash severance charges and $8 million in share-based compensation costs tied to the cuts, according to its own disclosures. Three months later, it is expanding in Toronto rather than contracting, a divergence the company has not directly addressed but that fits a pattern of U.S. tech firms trimming headcount at home while betting on growth in specific international markets.
For Canadian fintech, the stakes are competitive rather than abstract. Robinhood is now going head to head with Wealthsimple and Questrade on pricing, and with Netcoins, Shakepay, Coinbase and Kraken specifically on crypto, in a market its own executives have called a “priority.”
