MENLO PARK, CA — Robinhood has tapped Meta alum Rochelle Nadhiri to serve as the investment platform’s head of communications.

As VP of communications, Nadhiri will lead Robinhood’s communications team. She will report to chief legal, compliance and corporate affairs officer Dan Gallagher.

Nadhiri replaces Josh Drobnyk, who left Robinhood to be Caribou's VP of comms.

Nadhiri joins from Facebook parent Meta, where she focused on privacy, innovation and the metaverse as a policy strategy lead. She joined Meta in 2016 to lead litigation communications for the company along with privacy policy communications for face recognition, location, friending and data transparency.

Nadhiri's arrival comes roughly seven months after Christina Smedley  stepped down from her role as chief marketing and communications officer following a tumultuous year for the investment platform.


Smedley’s exit came a year after joining Robinhood as its first CMO and communications head, as which she was responsible for consolidating marketing, communications and content under one function. Before that, Smedley spent five years at Facebook, where she most recently was VP of brand and marketing for Novi, a digital wallet for the Libra blockchain payment network.

Smedley’s Robinhood tenure was marked by a PR crisis earlier this year, when the stock trading app faced considerable scrutiny — and 30-plus lawsuits — related to the GameStop buying frenzy. At that time, Robinhood was working with at least two communications firms, Zeno and digital firm MediaMonks, as it tried to get control of the PR crisis that blew up when the platform restricted users’ ability to buy GameStop stock, the price of which they drove up at the expense of short sellers on Wall Street.


Robinhood does not have plans to hire a new CMO, a spokesperson said.