What a difference a changing regulatory environment makes.

Roughly nine months after suggesting that a young copy trading platform could only operate because it flew “under the radar” of regulators, Robinhood has announced its own entry into the space with “Robinhood Social,” a new feature that will allow users to follow and manually replicate the trades of prominent investors.

The move represents a striking about-face for the online brokerage, which has historically been cautious about features that could attract regulatory scrutiny. The company famously ditched its celebratory digital confetti feature ahead of its 2021 IPO after regulators raised concerns about gamifying trading, making its embrace of copy trading, another potentially gamified feature, all the more notable.

This wariness was on full display in December, when in a conversation with this editor about upstart copy trading platform Dub, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev suggested that such platforms could operate primarily because of their smaller size, proposing that “copy trading could become of greater interest to regulators” and that Dub may not yet be under the “magnifying glass” because of its “comparatively smaller size.”

Now, Robinhood is betting that the regulatory landscape has changed enough to safely enter the copy trading market.

The timing is particularly notable given the pointed criticism Robinhood faced earlier this year from Dub’s 23-year-old founder Steven Wang, who has positioned his platform as a more educationally-focused alternative to traditional trading apps.

“I have a lot of respect for what [CEO] Vlad [Tenev] has done in making trading free,” Wang told me back in February. “But at the end of the day, making it super easy to trade without expert guidance, without education, is really just gambling for the broader population.”

Wang has consistently argued that Dub’s approach – which includes risk scores, risk-adjusted returns, and portfolio stability metrics – represents a safer alternative to platforms like Robinhood. In his conversation with TechCrunch, Wang was also critical of Robinhood’s decision to offer meme coins like TRUMP, saying the incentives are “misaligned between these big platforms that are public companies now that need to make money.”

Tuesday’s news, announced at Robinhood’s company event earlier in the day, brought to mind the possibility that Robinhood had, in fact, acquired four-year-old Dub, which officially launched just last year and has so far raised $47 million in funding from investors. But reached for comment, a Robinhood spokesperson responded via email, “No, this is not an acquisition, we are building our own platform in Robinhood.” A request for comment from Wang was not returned by press time.

Robinhood’s version of copy trading differs meaningfully from platforms like Dub and established players like eToro, which has offered copy trading to U.S. users for years through its CopyTrader feature. While eToro allows automatic copying of other traders’ portfolios in real-time (with U.S. users limited to copying only other U.S. traders due to regulations), Dub allows users to automatically copy entire portfolios for a $10 monthly subscription, and Robinhood Social will require users to manually replicate trades, a distinction that may help address regulatory concerns.

The platform, set to launch early next year, will feature verified traders and display the activities of famous investors and members of Congress. Unlike the informal copy trading that happens on social media, Robinhood will require identity verification and proof of actual portfolio positions. The plan, according to the company, is to first invite 10,000 Robinhood Social users to test out the service before rolling it out more widely.

The launch comes at a time when the regulatory landscape is fast evolving. Crypto companies were scrutinized heavily under the Biden administration, while numerous crypto companies have become publicly traded companies in recent months, their path eased by the Trump administration’s crypto-friendly stance. Meanwhile, copy trading – long common in Europe but heavily restricted in the U.S. – may be gaining acceptance finally.

Seen through that lense, Robinhood’s entry into copy trading represents more than just another feature launch; it could signal the opening of floodgates for a wave of new platforms. If Robinhood can successfully negotiate the legal landscape that has long limited copy trading in the U.S., other fintech outfits seem likely to follow suit. eToro’s successful May IPO, which raised $310 million and saw shares surge 29% on their debut, has already demonstrated strong investor appetite for copy trading platforms.

Whether this potential wave is good news or bad for retail investors  – or it will mostly serve to boost fintech valuations – is an open question. For right now, Robinhood’s shareholders are probably the clearest winners.

Last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt Side Events drew hundreds of founders, investors, and operators after hours — from intimate roundtables to lively happy hours to full-on pitch competitions. Each event unlocked new opportunities for the hosts: investor deal flow, talent connections, and brand exposure with the startup community.

This year, you can do the same. As a Side Event host during “Disrupt Week” (October 25–31), you’ll tap into an audience of 10,000+ attendees, plus the broader Bay Area tech community.

Why host a Side Event?

• Visibility: Your brand featured in Disrupt 2025 Side Event listings on the event site, event app, and TechCrunch.com.
• Connections: Meet startup leaders and investors in your own environment.
• Flexibility: From panels to parties, it’s your format, your brand.

Applications are free — and spots are limited. Submit your Side Event before applications close this Friday, September 12.

On a farm near Manchester, New Hampshire, I was recently treated to a gusher of dirty water, not exactly the sort of thing that most startups will show a reporter. But for Dig Energy, the mud is a feature, not a bug, of its compact drilling rig. 

The startup, which has been operating in stealth for the last five years, developed the water-jet drilling rig in an effort to make geothermal heating and cooling so inexpensive that it will displace fossil fuel boilers and furnaces. The rig is central to that, promising to slash drilling costs by up to 80%.

On Tuesday, Dig Energy emerged with $5 million in seed funding, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The round was led by Azolla Ventures and Avila VC with participation from Baukunst, Conifer Infrastructure Partners, Koa Labs, Mercator Partners, Drew Scott, and Suffolk Technologies.

Heating and cooling represent about a third of all energy use in the U.S., and in data centers, the figure can be as high as 40%. Geothermal can slash HVAC energy use while also saving grid operators up to $4 billion annually. To help stabilize its creaking electrical grid, the U.S. needs to drill 6 million feet of geothermal borehole daily through 2050, according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

But geothermal doesn’t come cheap, at least not at first.

“In the United States, geothermal has been 1% of building installations for decades,” Dig co-founder and CEO Dulcie Madden told TechCrunch. That’s despite the technology’s low operating costs. “It’s really just because upfront cost is so, so, so expensive.”

There are two main flavors of geothermal: Enhanced geothermal drills down thousands or tens of thousands of feet. Companies like Fervo and Quaise that are drilling the deep are tapping very hot temperatures — usually in the hundreds of degrees — to generate electricity. The other, shallow geothermal, which is what Dig is focused on, is usually limited to hundreds of feet. At those depths, the ground maintains a consistent temperature year round, which is perfect for heating and cooling residential and commercial buildings.

In shallow geothermal, pipes carry water underground where it transfers heat to or from the earth. In the summer, it dumps excess heat, and the chilled water returns to the surface to cool a building. In the winter, it absorbs heat to warm it.

Installing the ground loop, as the underground piping is called, represents around 30% of the total cost of a ground-source heat pump and is one of the main reasons the technology remains more expensive than conventional heating and air conditioning systems. Tackling those costs was high on Dig’s list. 

“When we were getting started, we were like, can we build a lower-cost drill?” Madden said.

Madden and her co-founder, husband Thomas Lipoma, began exploring the space five years ago after winding down their previous startup, Rest Devices. They soon stumbled upon old research describing how to use water jets instead of traditional cutting bits to bore into the Earth.

But while there had been plenty of research into the technology, it still wasn’t ready for prime time. “A lot of the drilling technology has trickled down from oil and gas,” Madden said. Translation: It tends to be large, expensive, and overpowered for something like geothermal at the depths Dig is plumbing.

Dig has spent years refining the design of its rig, drilling test holes near its offices in New Hampshire. They’ve drilled through soil, gravel, clay, sand, and a range of different rock types, including sandstone, limestone, granite, slate, and shale. The team showed me test blocks of some very dense rock with neat holes blasted through the middle.

Today’s geothermal drill rigs can do the same, but they’re massive by comparison. The most commonly used versions sit on the back of large trucks. For easily accessible sites, they work well enough. But they are unable to squeeze through side lots into people’s backyards, and at crowded commercial building sites, they occupy precious free space.

While Dig’s prototype isn’t ready for commercial use, what I saw was substantially smaller than widely used geothermal drill rigs. The holes it drills are also straighter than those made by traditional rigs. Together, those two details mean that Dig’s bore holes can be placed closer together, a boon for any developer. 

When it’s ready for its first commercial pilots — something this seed round will help accomplish — Dig’s rig will grow in size slightly, but it won’t require the large, double-axle trucks that currently dominate the industry.

The company is planning to sell the devices to drillers, giving them another option for existing projects and potentially opening avenues to new ones. Other companies are exploring the technology, too. 

“We shouldn’t have to require people to buy a $2 million rig, it should be something that’s lower cost where they can get into the business,” Madden said. “Geothermal should be in 100% of buildings. It’s in 1% of buildings. So how do we close the 99%?” she added. “It’s effectively an untapped market.”