In late August 2026, Zerodha shared its numbers for the year ended March 2026. Net profit rose about 1.2% to Rs 4,283 crore, while revenue stayed roughly where it was a year earlier, according to Inc42. For a broker that never raised venture capital, a flat year at that level of profit says a lot about how Nithin Kamath built the business.
The early years
Kamath was born on October 5, 1979, in Shivamogga, Karnataka. His family later moved to Bengaluru, where he studied engineering at the Bangalore Institute of Technology. He started trading at 17, first by managing his father’s trading account.
For about three years in the early 2000s, he worked night shifts as a tele-sales associate at a call centre serving US customers, and traded during the day. He has called those years some of the most fun of his life. “I think I’ve had the most fun in my life during my call centre days,” he told YourStory in 2020. He has also said he went bust twice as a trader before Zerodha.
The idea
By 2004, Kamath was working as a sub-broker through a franchise of a larger broker. Over a decade of trading, he had run into many of the hurdles that small traders faced with traditional brokers. During the 2008 market slowdown he made a small profit, enough to get his own exchange licence.
Zerodha started operations on August 15, 2010, with his brother Nikhil Kamath as co-founder. The name joins “zero” with “rodha,” a Sanskrit word for barrier. The company introduced discount broking in India, charging a flat Rs 20 per trade regardless of order size.
The hard part
Zerodha started from a small office with about 30 people. Kamath did a lot of cold calling himself in the first two years.
Around 2014 and 2015, the team faced a harder question. They estimated that India had only about 3 to 4 lakh active traders, too small a pool to build a large company on. The fix was to widen the audience to long-term investors and younger first-time users. That needed better technology. After Kailash Nadh, now the CTO, joined, Zerodha replaced vendor software with its own in-house products.
Kamath has explained his view of bootstrapping simply: “if you want to bootstrap, you need to have some edge.” For Zerodha, that meant low cost and hustle.
How it grew
Zerodha grew mostly by word of mouth, with little advertising and no outside funding. It also invested in investor education through Varsity, its free learning platform, and in 2015 set up Rainmatter, a fund and incubator for fintech startups. Over time it added Zerodha Capital for lending and Zerodha AMC for mutual funds.
The company says it has more than 1.8 crore clients and accounts for over 15% of retail trading volumes in India. It also describes itself as the country’s largest broker by net worth, citing NSE.
The profits followed. Zerodha reported revenue of Rs 9,993 crore in FY24, which slipped to Rs 8,847 crore in FY25, with net profit of Rs 4,231 crore that year. Note that Zerodha shares indicative bar graphs rather than full accounts, so media reports work out the exact figures from those charts.
Where it stands now
The last two years have been tougher. Trading activity has cooled since the Indian market peaked in September 2024. Tighter regulation of futures and options trading and the end of transaction-charge rebates hit brokers’ income. Zerodha’s brokerage income fell about 10.7% to Rs 2,738 crore in FY26.
Growth in margin trading (MTF) has filled part of the gap. Zerodha’s MTF book reached about Rs 9,000 crore and now makes up about 10% of revenue. Kamath has been cautious about it. “MTF is one area where the business growth is scaring me,” he said, as quoted by Inc42. He also warned that leverage “can get bad really, really quickly” when markets turn.
Competition is tight too. NSE data showed Zerodha had 67.62 lakh active clients in July 2026, a market share of about 14.88%. It plans to add US investing and more mutual fund features.
Lessons for founders
Solve a problem you know well. Kamath spent more than a decade as a trader before starting Zerodha. He built what he wished he had.
Bootstrapping needs an edge. Without outside money, Zerodha had to be cheaper and more careful from day one.
Widen the market when it looks small. When the pool of active traders looked limited, the company moved towards long-term investors and new users.
Plan for flat years. Zerodha’s steady FY26 profit shows the value of low costs and more than one income stream.
Reporting based on Inc42, YourStory (2026), YourStory (2020), Zerodha and Wikipedia.
Featured image: Kushagra140, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
