Groww

Timeline

1. 2016Lalit Keshre leaves Flipkart with three former colleagues, Harsh Jain, Ishan Bansal and Neeraj Singh, to build Groww as a mutual fund investment platform.
2. 2017Groww positions itself around direct mutual funds, which carry no distributor commission and a lower expense ratio for the investor.
3. 2019The platform adds stock broking, moving from a mutual fund marketplace into a full brokerage application.
4. 2020Retail investing surges during the pandemic and Groww's account numbers grow fast through 2020 and 2021.
5. 2021The company raises a large growth round as Indian fintech valuations climb, alongside Cred, Pine Labs and Razorpay.
6. 2023Groww launches Groww AMC and begins running its own mutual fund schemes rather than only distributing other companies' funds.
7. 2024The company expands beyond broking into margin trading, credit and fixed income products for its existing users.
8. 2025Groww acquires Fisdom for about Rs 961 crore, adding wealth advisory expertise for affluent customers.
9. 2025November: Billionbrains Garage Ventures lists on the Indian stock exchanges, giving Groww a public market valuation of roughly 13 billion dollars.
10. 2026The company begins a phased rollout of United States stock investing through GIFT City.
11. 2026State Street completes a Rs 580 crore investment for 23 per cent of Groww AMC, valuing the asset management arm separately from the parent.
12. 2026Peak XV Partners sells Groww shares worth Rs 1,756 crore, reporting a return of about 92 times on its investment.
13. 2026Sebi's closing auction session rules for derivatives settlement slow equity derivatives revenue, and Groww reports a 14.3 per cent sequential decline in that line.
14. 2026September quarter: revenue from operations rises 47 per cent to Rs 1,501 crore and net profit rises 54 per cent to Rs 725 crore.
15. 2026Groww says it accounted for 43.6 per cent of new systematic investment plan registrations in the September quarter.
16. 2026The company's active client base reaches 1.34 crore and its broking market share 29.16 per cent, its highest so far.
17. 2026Groww is named Startup of the Year at the Economic Times Startup Awards, after growing at scale while staying profitable.
18. 2026Chief executive Lalit Keshre says the revenue mix will keep shifting as wealth, margin financing and newer businesses grow from a small base.

What it does

Groww is a consumer investment platform. A user opens an account, completes the know your customer process digitally, and can then buy mutual funds, stocks, exchange traded funds, initial public offerings, derivatives, fixed deposits and gold from one application. The company makes money from the transactions and from the money it manages: brokerage on trades, distribution revenue on mutual funds, interest on margin funding, and fees through its own asset management company.^[1]

The original product was a mutual fund marketplace built for first time investors. Groww's pitch was simplicity, with education content explaining what a fund is and why direct plans cost less than regular ones. It began as a mutual fund platform in 2016, added stocks in 2019 and later moved into exchange traded funds, initial public offerings, derivatives, credit and United States stocks, which is how a fund distributor became a full brokerage.^[10]

Wealth is the newer direction. Groww is building advisory, bonds and United States stock investing around the broking account, and it bought Fisdom for about Rs 961 crore in 2025 to add expertise for richer customers. At the end of the September 2026 quarter the company said wealth assets had crossed Rs 10,000 crore and the assets under management at its own fund house had risen 145 per cent from a year earlier to Rs 7,179 crore.^[5]

History

Groww was founded in 2016 by Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain, Ishan Bansal and Neeraj Singh, all of whom had worked at Flipkart. Keshre had joined Flipkart as an early product manager and worked on its marketplace and on consumer products, and he had also co-founded an online learning company in 2011 before turning to investing. The four left together in 2016 and started with mutual funds, at a time when most Indians bought funds through distributors or not at all.^[10]

The broking launch in 2019 changed the size of the business. Retail participation in Indian equities rose sharply through 2020 and 2021, and Groww's simple interface appealed to first time investors who found traditional brokerage terminals difficult. The company grew its account base through those years and began to appear in the same conversations as Zerodha, which had built the largest discount brokerage in the country.^[6]

A listing in November 2025 was the next step. Billionbrains Garage Ventures, the parent company that operates Groww, went public and the business was valued at about 13 billion dollars. Public ownership brought a different kind of scrutiny: quarterly results, investor presentations and questions about how much of the profit depends on derivatives trading, which is now the central issue for the stock.^[12]

Founders and leadership

Lalit Keshre is the chief executive officer and the public face of the company. He grew up in a farming family in Lepa, a village in Khargone district in Madhya Pradesh, lived with his grandparents as a child and studied at the only English medium school in his district before winning a place at IIT Bombay. He completed a dual degree in electrical engineering, with a B.Tech and an M.Tech, in 2004, and later worked at Flipkart before founding Groww in 2016. Forbes put his net worth at about 1.1 billion dollars in 2026.^[10]

The other three founders, Harsh Jain, Ishan Bansal and Neeraj Singh, came from the same Flipkart background and have stayed with the company through its growth. Keshre describes the team's approach as long term planning with short term execution, and he says the working style did not change much after the listing, with one important exception: customers are now also shareholders, which he argues removes the usual conflict between users and owners.^[12]

The management layer has been rebuilt for a public company. Groww runs an investor relations function, publishes quarterly presentations and guides analysts on revenue mix and margins, which it did not have to do while private. Keshre also talks about the internal effect of quarterly reporting, saying that the need to set quarterly goals has raised expectations inside teams and made balancing predictability with innovation more difficult.^[12]

The broking business

Stock broking is Groww's largest business by revenue and by customer count. The company had about 1.34 crore active clients at the end of September 2026, according to National Stock Exchange data, which gave it a market share of 29.16 per cent, up from 29.04 per cent in August. During that month Groww added 1,00,961 active clients and accounted for more than 60 per cent of the industry's net addition of 1.6 lakh accounts, while the total industry base stood at 4.61 crore.^[4]

The revenue within broking is changing shape. Equity derivatives and stock trading contributed 68.4 per cent of Groww's total income in the June 2026 quarter, down from 75.7 per cent a year earlier, as margin financing and other products grew. In the September quarter, equity derivatives revenue fell 14.3 per cent from the previous quarter, most of which the company attributed to the market regulator's new closing auction session rules.^[5]

The company's comparison with Zerodha is the one Indian market watchers make most often. Analysts describe it as a split decision, with Groww winning the race for customer numbers and Zerodha earning more from a smaller base of accounts. Groww's own investor materials lean on the breadth of its product set, arguing that a customer who starts with mutual funds can be served with stocks, derivatives, credit and wealth products over time, which raises revenue per user without needing more users.^[6]

Mutual funds and wealth management

Mutual funds remain the entry point into the platform and now the fastest growing part of it. Direct mutual fund assets held through Groww rose 45.9 per cent from a year earlier to Rs 2.06 lakh crore at the end of September 2026, and 7.8 per cent from about Rs 1.9 lakh crore in June. The company said it accounted for 43.6 per cent of all new systematic investment plan registrations in the July to September quarter, a measure of how much new monthly investing flows through its application.^[3]

Systematic investment plans matter because they are recurring. A monthly investment instruction keeps a customer on the platform and pays a fee every month, so a large share of new registrations translates into a predictable revenue stream that does not depend on trading volumes. Groww has built education content and an artificial intelligence assisted advisory layer around this business to bring in first time investors rather than only experienced traders.^[3]

Wealth management is the next layer up, aimed at customers whose portfolios have grown. Groww is expanding advisory, bond investing and international investing, and it says the existing customer base is becoming wealthier and needs more products. The Fisdom acquisition in 2025 was made for exactly this reason, adding a team and products for affluent customers rather than more retail accounts.^[5]

The mutual fund business also explains why Groww's customer numbers move independently of the stock market. A systematic investment plan is set up once and debited every month, so registrations continue through flat or falling markets, and the company collects a fee on assets rather than on trades. That is the part of the platform least exposed to a drop in derivatives volumes, and it is why the 43.6 per cent share of new plan registrations in the September quarter carries more weight than its size suggests.^[3]

Selling to people who already hold an account is cheaper than winning new ones, and Groww has built its product roadmap around that. First time investors arrive for a mutual fund, then add stocks, then an exchange traded fund or an initial public offering, and the company hopes a share will eventually move into margin financing, bonds or United States stocks. Analysts describe the strategy as monetising a customer base rather than adding one, which is a fair reading of a quarter in which revenue per user rose while client additions across the industry slowed.^[6]

Groww AMC and the asset management business

Groww runs its own mutual fund house rather than only distributing other companies' schemes. The asset management company's assets under management rose 145 per cent from a year earlier to Rs 7,179 crore in the September 2026 quarter, a small base in an industry measured in lakhs of crores but one that grows from the platform's own customer traffic. Groww advertises its schemes inside the application it already owns, which lowers the cost of winning investors compared with a fund house that has to buy distribution.^[1]

The fund business also brought outside capital. State Street completed a Rs 580 crore investment in Groww AMC in 2026 for a 23 per cent stake, a transaction that valued the fund house separately from the parent. For a company that had just listed, bringing in a global asset manager as a minority partner in one subsidiary is a way to fund growth and borrow credibility without diluting the main shareholder register.^[8]

Groww's fund range includes value oriented schemes, and the company has appeared in market commentary about cash levels in such funds. The asset management arm matters to the group because it shifts revenue away from trade execution, which is cyclical and sensitive to regulation, towards management fees charged on assets, which are steadier. That is the same logic that has pushed Groww into advisory, bonds and international investing.^[8]

Newer businesses: margin trading, credit and US stocks

Margin trading is the fastest growing line outside derivatives. Groww lends customers money against shares they hold so they can buy more, and it earns interest on the loan. Analysts tracking the stock noted that the margin trading facility book had reached a new peak in 2026, with the growth expected to continue and yields on cash balances expected to improve. In the September 2026 quarter the company said most products, including margin trading and commodity derivatives, contributed more to income than they had a year earlier.^[1]

Credit products extend the same idea to customers without a broking balance. Groww offers small loans and credit instruments to its users, and the credit business grew quickly enough that the company now describes the revenue mix as still evolving. It also runs fixed deposit and bond offerings, which give conservative investors a reason to open a Groww account even if they do not want to trade.^[5]

International investing is the newest. Groww began a phased rollout of United States stock investing through GIFT City in 2026, which lets Indian residents buy foreign shares through a regulated Indian route rather than sending money abroad directly. The company has said international investing, bonds and advisory are the three wealth products it expects to scale, and it treats the broking account as the distribution channel for all three.^[7]

Revenue and financials

Groww's accounts are now public, which makes it the clearest window into how Indian retail investing is doing. For the September 2026 quarter, the second quarter of the 2027 financial year, revenue from operations came in at Rs 1,501 crore, up 47 per cent from Rs 1,019 crore in the same quarter a year earlier. Net profit attributable to the owners of the company was Rs 725.6 crore, up 54 per cent from Rs 471 crore, and the profit margin after tax rose to 47 per cent from 44 per cent.^[1]

The sequential picture is flatter than the annual one. Revenue was almost unchanged from the June quarter and net profit dipped about 1 per cent, while earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation edged up 1 per cent to Rs 968 crore from Rs 960 crore. The ebitda margin improved by 60 basis points to 64.5 per cent, and total expenses rose 29 per cent from a year earlier to Rs 556 crore. Growth in a quarter like this comes from mixing products rather than from a rising market alone.^[2]

Operating activity in the same quarter shows where the new customers came from. Groww added about 11 lakh new transacting users, helped by primary market activity: about 42 lakh users applied for equity initial public offerings through the platform, giving it a 22 per cent share of total allotments. That is a direct consequence of listing a platform in a year when many of its own customers were doing the same thing for the first time.^[1]

Analysts were more cautious than the results. Before the results were published, Motilal Oswal Financial Services had estimated revenue of Rs 1,434 crore and an ebitda of Rs 866 crore, and it flagged pressure on the derivatives line and on margins. After the numbers came in above those estimates for revenue, the brokerage kept its buy rating with a target price of Rs 240 against a market price of about Rs 193, while trimming its earnings per share estimates for the next two years.^[15]

Shareholding and ownership

Groww's shareholder register changed character in 2025 when the parent company listed. Before the listing the register was dominated by venture investors and the founders; afterwards, a large part of the company is held by public market investors, including the retail investors who also use the platform. Chief executive Lalit Keshre has described this overlap as unusual, saying the company no longer has a separate set of shareholders and customers.^[12]

Venture investors have begun to sell into the new liquidity. Peak XV Partners sold Groww shares worth Rs 1,756 crore in 2026 and reported a return of about 92 times on its investment, in a block deal in which about 10.07 crore shares changed hands and the stock fell nearly 3 per cent in a session. Reported exits of that size are a normal feature of a freshly listed company and a reminder that the founders and their early backers now answer to a market that sets the price daily.^[9]

The founders' own holdings are now public information. Forbes put Keshre's net worth at about 1.1 billion dollars in 2026, most of it in Groww stock, and Indian business press has described it as roughly Rs 10,000 crore. The rest of the original team, Harsh Jain, Ishan Bansal and Neeraj Singh, also hold shares from the founding years, and employees hold stock options that vest against the listed price.^[10]

Employees and offices

Groww is headquartered in Bengaluru and employs engineering, product, operations, compliance and research teams from that base. The company has never run the very large support organisations that traditional brokerages carry, because most of its account opening and transactions are digital and its customer conversations happen in the application. That lean structure is one reason its margins are high for a financial services company.^[1]

The workforce has grown with the product set. Adding an asset management company, a margin funding book, an advisory business and an international investing route means research analysts, fund managers, risk and compliance staff and licensed advisory personnel, and the acquisitions of Fisdom and other businesses brought existing teams with them. The company also runs hiring for a public market business, which means investor relations and financial reporting roles that do not exist inside a private company.^[8]

Office locations have stayed concentrated in Bengaluru, and the company has not described a large overseas office network. Its international expansion is product led, using the GIFT City route to give Indian customers access to foreign shares rather than opening branches abroad, which keeps the cost base in India.^[7]

Acquisitions and investments

Groww's largest purchase was Fisdom, a wealth technology company, for about Rs 961 crore in 2025. The deal added a team and products aimed at wealthier customers, including advisory and distribution of investment products, and it fed directly into the wealth management push that the company now talks about in every earnings call. It was the clearest signal that Groww intends to earn from assets rather than only from trades.^[5]

The company has also invested where it wanted capability rather than ownership. Building the asset management business required people who had run mutual funds, so it hired and partnered rather than bought, and it brought State Street in as a 23 per cent shareholder in the fund house for Rs 580 crore. Investments of this kind keep the parent's balance sheet lighter while giving the newer business the credibility of an established partner.^[8]

On future deals, the chief executive has set out a clear test. Keshre said further acquisitions would depend on synergy, that Groww would consider a good opportunity if it appeared but was not actively looking for one, and that the immediate priority is to scale the businesses it already owns. That stance is typical of a newly listed company balancing growth against the earnings expectations of public shareholders.^[5]

Regulation: the closing auction session and derivatives revenue

The largest regulatory change in Groww's recent history is the closing auction session introduced by the Securities and Exchange Board of India in 2026 to settle derivatives contracts. The new mechanism changed how closing prices are calculated for key stocks and derivative contracts, and it caused sharp volatility in the Sensex and Nifty indices after it started in August. Investors traded less, and brokers that earn from derivatives volumes felt it immediately.^[13]

The effect on Groww was measurable. Equity derivatives revenue fell 14.3 per cent from the June quarter to the September quarter of 2026, and the contribution of equity derivatives to total income fell 12.2 percentage points from a year earlier. The company attributed the bulk of the decline to the new settlement rules and said the fall was in line with what the industry experienced, rather than a loss of market share.^[1]

The rules may be relaxed. Sebi received about 20,000 comments on a consultation paper about the auction, market timings and settlement methodology, and reports in 2026 said the regulator would likely stop using closing auctions to price derivatives settlement for at least a year and use a volume weighted average price from the last thirty minutes of trading instead. Capital market stocks, including Groww, rose on that report. Groww's own position is that the change would help normalise trading activity.^[13]

The UPI charging debate

Groww appears in the 2026 debate over whether digital payments should carry a merchant charge because brokers collect money from customers through the Unified Payments Interface. When Parliament moved to amend the law that barred such charges, new age brokers including Groww and Zerodha said they would write to Sebi on the merchant discount rate, arguing their side of a question that mainly concerns payment companies. The Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill removed the statutory bar but did not set a rate.^[14]

For a brokerage the issue is operational rather than existential. A charge on large merchant payments affects how cheaply a platform can collect money from customers who fund trading accounts, and any cost there lands on the same margins that Groww's investors watch. The company's interest is in a predictable framework rather than in the level of the charge, which is why its position is closer to the payment industry's than to consumer groups'.^[14]

Competition

Zerodha is the clearest rival and the most useful comparison. Zerodha built the largest discount brokerage in India on low prices and a technology first approach, and it is smaller than Groww on active clients while larger on earnings. Groww's answer is product breadth: mutual funds, initial public offerings, margin funding, credit, wealth and international investing all sit in the same application, so a customer who arrives for one product can be sold others.^[6]

Other competitors sit on either side of that position. Angel One and Upstox compete for the same retail trading accounts, while the mutual fund side includes established distributors and direct plans sold by fund houses themselves. In wealth, Groww meets both large advisory firms and newer platforms, which is why the Fisdom purchase mattered, and in asset management it competes with every other fund house for a share of household savings.^[8]

The competitive fight has shifted to what happens after a customer opens an account. Broking is a business with falling prices, so the companies that keep earning are the ones that sell a second and third product, whether that is a loan against shares, a systematic investment plan, a bond or a United States share. Groww's revenue mix numbers, with derivatives falling from 75.7 per cent to 68.4 per cent of income in a year, are the clearest evidence of how that fight is going.^[5]

Controversies and criticism

The most persistent criticism of Groww and its peers is that derivatives trading has become the profit engine of retail investing in India. A platform earns more when customers trade options, and most individual options traders lose money, which is why Sebi has tightened rules on derivatives and why the closing auction session and the consultation around it attracted 20,000 public comments. Groww's own disclosure that equity derivatives and stock trading supplied 68.4 per cent of total income in the June 2026 quarter shows how central that business still is.^[5]

The company has answered that criticism by pointing to product diversification rather than by denying the dependence. Margin financing, commodity derivatives, mutual funds, wealth and credit all grew faster than derivatives in 2026, and the management has said the revenue mix will keep evolving as newer businesses scale. Whether that is enough to satisfy a regulator worried about retail losses is an open question, and it is the risk most analysts attach to the stock.^[6]

A second criticism follows from being listed. Groww's share price has been sensitive to regulatory news, falling when Sebi proposed changes and rising when a relaxation was reported, and a block deal by Peak XV Partners saw the stock drop nearly 3 per cent in a session even though selling by an early investor is expected after any listing. For customers who are also shareholders, that overlap that Keshre calls an advantage can also mean the platform's own news moves their portfolio.^[9]

Awards and recognition

Groww was adjudged Startup of the Year at the Economic Times Startup Awards in 2026, an award the jury gave for scaling rapidly while staying profitable. The 11 member jury was chaired by Wipro executive chairman Rishad Premji and deliberated for nearly three hours before picking winners in eight categories. Groww joined a list of past winners that includes Urban Company, Lenskart, OfBusiness, Razorpay, Zomato, Zerodha, Delhivery, Swiggy, Oyo, Freshworks and Ola, which is a fair description of the companies Indian investors have valued most highly over the previous decade.^[11]

The recognition came in the same year as the award ceremony itself became a public market event. Groww's chief executive shared a stage with Meesho's chief executive to talk about what changes after an initial public offering, and both described a shift in how decisions are made once retail investors, including retired couples who had put their life savings into the company, start asking questions at annual general meetings. For a platform whose customers are also its shareholders, that shift is more literal than it is for most newly listed companies.^[12]

Analyst expectations were more measured than the awards. Before the September 2026 results were published, Motilal Oswal Financial Services had estimated revenue of Rs 1,434 crore and an ebitda of Rs 866 crore, and it flagged pressure on the derivatives line and on margins. The numbers came in above those estimates, and the brokerage kept its buy rating with a target price of Rs 240 while cutting its earnings estimates for FY27 and FY28, which is a way of saying that the business is sound but that regulation of derivatives will cost it earnings.^[15]

Reading the numbers

Four numbers describe Groww today. Revenue from operations of Rs 1,501 crore in the September 2026 quarter, up 47 per cent from a year earlier, shows the underlying business is still growing fast. Net profit of Rs 725.6 crore, up 54 per cent, shows it is doing so profitably, with a profit margin after tax of 47 per cent. An active client base of 1.34 crore and a market share of 29.16 per cent in September 2026 show the customer franchise. And mutual fund assets of Rs 2.06 lakh crore held directly through the platform show how much of the money on Groww is not exposed to trading volumes.^[1]

The quality of the growth is in the mix. Sequential revenue was almost flat from the June quarter and net profit dipped about 1 per cent, so year on year comparisons flatter the company while quarter on quarter ones show a business digesting a regulatory shock to its most profitable product. Expenses rose 29 per cent, slower than revenue, which is why margins held up despite the derivatives decline.^[2]

For an investor, the two figures to watch are the share of income from equity derivatives and the growth of wealth and margin financing. If derivatives keep falling as a share of the total while revenue keeps rising, Groww is diversifying as it claims. If revenue falls with derivatives, then the platform is still a trading business with a wealth sideline attached.^[5]

The valuation is the last piece. Groww carried a market capitalisation of about 13 billion dollars in 2026, against annualised revenue of roughly Rs 6,000 crore at the September quarter run rate, which prices in both the customer franchise and the risk attached to derivatives regulation. Analysts' target prices in the low Rs 200s on a share price around Rs 193 suggest a market that is still deciding which of those two it believes.^[8]

At the September 2026 run rate the annualised revenue is roughly Rs 6,000 crore against a market capitalisation of about 13 billion dollars, which is the trade off a public market investor is being asked to accept: a fast growing, highly profitable platform whose largest profit pool is under regulatory review. The company's own guidance points to the newer businesses carrying more of the mix, and the June quarter figures already show derivatives and stock trading below 70 per cent of income for the first time.^[5]

Related entries

• Lalit Keshre, co-founder and chief executive, who grew up in a farming family in Lepa in Madhya Pradesh and studied at IIT Bombay.
• Zerodha, the largest discount brokerage by earnings and the constant comparison for Groww in Indian market commentary.
• Razorpay, another Bengaluru fintech that raised at speed in 2021 and is preparing a listing of its own.
• Peak XV Partners, the former Sequoia India, which sold Rs 1,756 crore of Groww stock in 2026 at a reported 92 times return.
• Fisdom, the wealth technology company Groww acquired for about Rs 961 crore in 2025.
• State Street, which bought 23 per cent of Groww AMC for Rs 580 crore in 2026.