Lalit Keshre is the co-founder and CEO of Groww (Billionbrains Garage Ventures Ltd), India's largest stockbroker by active NSE clients. He started Groww in 2016 with three former Flipkart colleagues and took it public in November 2025.

Where is Lalit Keshre from?

He comes from a farming family in Lepa, a village in Madhya Pradesh. Because the village had no English-medium school, he grew up with his grandparents in the nearby town of Khargone.

What is Lalit Keshre's net worth?

After Groww's stock market debut in November 2025, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index put his wealth at about US$1 billion, and Outlook Business valued his stake at about Rs 9,448 crore. Nearly all of his wealth is his shareholding of just under 9% in Groww.

What is Lalit Keshre's education?

He holds a dual degree (B.Tech and M.Tech) in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay, completed in 2004. IIT Bombay named him a Distinguished Alumnus in 2025.

How did Lalit Keshre start Groww?

After an early job at Ittiam Systems, a failed video-learning startup called EduFlix and three years as a product manager at Flipkart, he founded Groww in May 2016 with Harsh Jain, Neeraj Singh and Ishan Bansal. Its first robo-advisor product failed; the team relaunched in 2017 as a simple mutual fund app and later added stocks, derivatives, loans and payments.

Has Groww faced any controversy?

SEBI settled two cases with Groww's broking arm in May 2025, over inspection findings and the handling of a January 2024 app outage, for about Rs 82 lakh in total, without any admission of wrongdoing. Groww's prospectus also discloses a pending criminal complaint in Lucknow naming the founders, which the company denies.

When did Groww list on the stock market?

Groww's Rs 6,632 crore IPO was priced at Rs 95-100 a share, and the stock listed on 12 November 2025, opening at Rs 114 on BSE.

Lalit Keshre: Groww Founder's Life Story

Key facts
Born	26 June 1981, in Lepa village, Madhya Pradesh [1][9][18]
Family roots	A farming family; he was raised by his grandparents in Khargone town [16][17][10]
Education	B.Tech + M.Tech (dual degree), Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay, 2004 [8][1]
Family	Father a farmer in Lepa; Keshre says his mother began using Groww in 2024 [19][14]
Company/Group	Groww (Billionbrains Garage Ventures Ltd): co-founder, MD and CEO [1]
Wealth	About US$1 billion (Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Nov 2025) [13]; stake valued at about Rs 9,448 crore after listing (Outlook Business, Nov 2025) [44]
Known for	Building India’s largest stockbroker by active clients from a mutual-fund app, and one of the most profitable new-age company IPOs [36][37][76]

Where it began

On the morning of 12 November 2025, shares of a Bengaluru company called Billionbrains Garage Ventures opened on the Bombay Stock Exchange at Rs 114, 14% above the Rs 100 at which they had been offered in the IPO the week before [44]. Within a week the stock had nearly doubled from the issue price, and the company’s chief executive, Lalit Keshre, had quietly become one of India’s newest billionaires [13][45].

The headlines that week kept returning to one detail. The man who now ran the country’s largest stockbroker by number of active clients had grown up far from Dalal Street. His father farmed land in Lepa, a village in Madhya Pradesh [9][18][19].

Keshre was born on 26 June 1981, according to Groww’s own IPO prospectus [1]. Lepa had no English-medium school, so he was sent to live with his grandparents in Khargone, a small town about 50 kilometres away [17][18]. “I grew up with my grandfather, which was in a small city, a very small city, around 50 kilometers from a village,” he said in a November 2025 interview with ICONIQ, one of Groww’s investors [10].

His grandfather left a strong mark. Keshre has told the story of coming first in his class in the second or third grade. When he shared the news, his grandfather said only: “Good.” Keshre credits his grandfather with shaping his character [20].

The library book and the day-old newspaper

Engineering was not the first dream. As a boy he wanted to join the Indian Administrative Service, the civil service that small-town India still treats as the summit of a respectable career [12]. He learned about the IIT entrance exam late, after Class 12 [16].

Preparation was a matter of making do. In a December 2025 podcast with Dilip Asbe, head of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Keshre recalled reading about the IIT-JEE in a library book. He prepared through a postal correspondence course from Brilliant Tutorials. His newspaper was a day-old copy of The Times of India, passed on by his grandfather’s boss [11].

He got in. Keshre joined IIT Bombay and earned a five-year dual degree, B.Tech and M.Tech, in Electrical Engineering, specialising in microelectronics, finishing in 2004 [8][18].

Mumbai opened a new world. “First time I came to know about entrepreneurship was on TV,” he said. “When I went to Bombay, I came to know about Apple and Silicon Valley and a lot of things” [10].

It was also where he first put money into the stock market. He bought his first share, worth about 80 rupees, out of his IIT stipend, and says he has been investing since his first year of college [11][22]. Bloomberg dates that first purchase to 2002, “for less than a dollar” [14]. Making investing that easy for ordinary Indians would, years later, become the core idea of his company.

The first break

A chip-design company and a startup that failed

After IIT, Keshre went south to Bengaluru and joined Ittiam Systems, a chip and signal-processing design firm, as an early team member [32][3]. Profiles based on his career record place him there from 2004 to about 2011 [18].

Then he took his first entrepreneurial swing. Around 2010-11 he co-founded EduFlix, an online marketplace where teachers could stream video lessons to students [21][8]. The idea was ahead of the pipes. Business Today reported that EduFlix ran for a little over two years before shutting down, because it “hit the bandwidth challenge as video transmission… was not fast enough for uninterrupted streaming” [21]. Some Hindi reports say the failure left him in debt [19]. That claim rests on a single source and could not be confirmed.

The lesson he took away was about timing and the customer: a product can be clever and still fail if the world around it is not ready.

Flipkart, and the habit of obsessing over customers

In 2013 Keshre joined Flipkart, then a fast-growing online retailer, as one of its early product managers [21]. He worked on the team that launched Flipkart’s marketplace and then incubated and led Flipkart Quick, a hyperlocal delivery service [24][25]. “I was also lucky I joined at the time when Flipkart was just taking off,” he later said [10].

Flipkart taught him the reflex that runs through every interview he has given since. “Sachin and Binny came from this Amazon background and they were very paranoid about building for the customer,” he said, referring to Flipkart’s founders [10]. (CapitalVia has profiled Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal.) “All of us were very obsessed with the customer thanks to Flipkart.”

At Flipkart he reconnected with Harsh Jain, whom he had known since 2003 [23]. Over many conversations the two realised that buying a mutual fund in India was still confusing, paper-heavy and pushed by commission-hungry agents. “We faced many problems when we started investing,” Keshre said in 2018. “Financial products are very complex and opaque” [24]. Another line became his summary of the industry: “financial products are sold and not bought” [26].

May 2016: four engineers and a borrowed office

Keshre left Flipkart in May 2016 [22]. Groww’s own blog marks 9 May 2016 as its foundation day, with the team working out of a borrowed office in Bengaluru [32].

He first asked Harsh Jain to join him. The two then recruited Neeraj Singh, an engineer, and Ishan Bansal, who was in Flipkart’s corporate development team and had been thinking about a similar idea [10][26]. All four were former Flipkart employees [3]. The roles settled quickly. “I look at product, Harsh looks at business,” Keshre said, with Singh on technology and Bansal on finance [10]. Today Jain is chief operating officer, Singh chief technology officer and Bansal chief financial officer [3].

“I think we were stupid and that’s why we did it,” Keshre admitted on the NPCI podcast. “If I had known… that it is so complicated, I would probably have done something else” [11].

The robo-advisor that nobody wanted

The first product was a robo-advisor, modelled on the US apps Wealthfront and Betterment: answer some questions, and an algorithm picks your funds [12][24]. It was, in Keshre’s words, “good and engaging, but customer acquisition was not happening” [10]. Indian customers did not trust a bot with their money, and they wanted to choose for themselves [24]. In the months before the relaunch, only 20 to 30 customers signed up a month [10].

So the founders went back to the ground. They spent close to a year talking to people, ran customer support themselves to build trust, and learned the rules of financial compliance from scratch [26][72]. Then they relaunched in 2017 as a plain, clean app for buying mutual funds, with zero commission to the customer [10][24].

“We thought if we get 100 customers this month, we’ll be happy,” Keshre recalled. “We got 600” [10]. The mobile app followed in December 2017 [77].

Y Combinator and the first cheques

In early 2018 Groww joined Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator, in its Winter 2018 batch, raising seed money from YC along with angel investors Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori [23][12]. In July 2018 it raised about US$1.6 million in a pre-Series A round led by Insignia Ventures Partners [27].

By then Groww had more than 1.5 lakh users and was still not earning money [24]. By January 2019, when Sequoia India led a US$6.2 million (about Rs 44 crore) Series A round, it had crossed 10 lakh registered users [25][28].

Keshre’s pitch was simple arithmetic. “There are 200 million people with investable income in India, but only 20 million investors,” he told TechCrunch. “The only way to bring the next 180 million on board is by making investing simple” [25].

Building the empire

Four years of zero revenue

Groww’s early growth came with an uncomfortable fact: it did not charge customers for direct mutual fund investments, and for about four years it was, as Keshre puts it, “a zero revenue company” [11][12]. The founders called the idea “delayed monetisation”: win trust first, then build products people would pay for [72].

Investors bought the story. Ribbit Capital led a US$21.4 million Series B in September 2019, and YC Continuity led a US$30 million Series C in September 2020 [29].

Stocks, and the pandemic rush

Groww began testing stock broking internally in October 2019 and rolled it out to customers about six months later, right as Covid-19 pushed millions of young Indians, stuck at home, to open their first demat accounts [32][1]. Futures and options followed in FY2022 [1].

The timing was extraordinary. In April 2021 a US$83 million Series D led by Tiger Global valued Groww at more than US$1 billion, making it a unicorn [29]. Six months later, in October 2021, ICONIQ Growth led a US$251 million Series E at a US$3 billion valuation [30]. Groww said it had more than 2 crore users, about 70% of them from outside the big metros [30].

In January 2022 Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella joined as an investor and adviser. “Groww gets one of the world’s best CEOs as an investor and advisor,” Keshre tweeted [31].

Overtaking Zerodha

For years, the undisputed leader of India’s discount-broking boom was Zerodha, built by Nithin Kamath and Nikhil Kamath. In September 2023 Groww passed it. NSE data showed Groww with 66.3 lakh active clients against Zerodha’s 64.2 lakh [36]. By May 2024 Groww had crossed 1 crore active NSE clients, the first broker to do so, with about a quarter of the market [37].

Its growth came from simplicity, a strong YouTube presence and a deliberate focus on first-time investors in small towns [30][70]. Keshre insists the company never watched its rivals. “Right from day zero our philosophy has been to not focus on competition at all,” he said in 2019 [26].

Payments, loans and a mutual fund house

Groww kept adding products, often small and quietly tested. It began offering credit in FY2022 and took UPI payments live inside its app on 4 July 2023 [1][35]. Its lending company, Groww Creditserv Technology, disbursed Rs 914.8 crore in FY24 and Rs 1,260.6 crore in FY25 [3].

In May 2023 it completed the purchase of Indiabulls Asset Management for about Rs 175.6 crore, renaming it Groww Asset Management [34]. In October 2025, just before its IPO, it completed the acquisition of Fisdom, a wealth-management platform, in an all-cash deal reported at about US$150 million, after SEBI approval [41][42]. Margin trading, loans against shares and commodity trading followed [1][6].

Keshre describes the internal structure as a set of small startups: “there are more than 10 products we have and they are very very small teams like startups running on those products” [11]. He is equally blunt about failure. “Fail fast. If you launch something and it doesn’t work, shut it down. We shut down one product almost every year” [10].

The Rs 1,340 crore homecoming

Like many Indian startups funded from Silicon Valley, Groww had been owned through a US parent, Groww Inc., incorporated in Delaware in December 2017 [1]. To list in India, it had to bring that parent home.

The National Company Law Tribunal in Bengaluru approved the merger of Groww Inc. into the Indian company on 28 March 2024 [1]. The cost was steep. Groww paid a one-time US tax of Rs 1,339.7 crore (about US$160 million), which turned a profitable year into a reported net loss of Rs 805 crore for FY24 [1][38][39]. Inc42, citing an Economic Times report, said the value used for the tax was set well below the 2021 valuation [40].

Keshre framed the move as a long-term choice. “We make so much money, we could keep it all,” he told The Economic Times before the IPO. “But that’s not how you build a 100-year-old company. We want to be accountable to the public just like all global financial services companies are” [15].

The numbers that made the IPO

By the time Groww filed its prospectus, it was among the most profitable of India’s new-age tech companies [76]. Its restated consolidated accounts show [1]:

Year	Revenue from operations	Net profit / (loss)
FY23	Rs 1,141.5 crore	Rs 457.7 crore
FY24	Rs 2,609.3 crore	(Rs 805.4 crore), after the Rs 1,339.7 crore redomicile tax
FY25	Rs 3,901.7 crore	Rs 1,824.4 crore

Customer assets on the platform grew from about Rs 47,800 crore in FY23 to about Rs 2.17 lakh crore in FY25 [3]. Broking, however, still made up 84.5% of revenue in FY25, a concentration the prospectus flagged as a key risk [3].

In June 2025 Singapore’s GIC and ICONIQ invested about Rs 1,735 crore in a pre-IPO round [33].

The IPO: November 2025

Groww’s Rs 6,632 crore IPO opened on 4 November 2025 at a price band of Rs 95-100 a share. Of that, Rs 1,060 crore was fresh money for the company; the rest was existing investors such as Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India), Y Combinator, Ribbit and Tiger Global selling part of their holdings [43][2]. At the top of the band, Groww was valued at about Rs 61,700 crore [47].

The stock listed on 12 November and opened at Rs 114 on BSE [44]. On 18 November it touched about Rs 194, nearly double the issue price, before falling 10% the next day [45]. Bloomberg’s billionaires desk counted Keshre as India’s newest billionaire, worth about US$1 billion, and the twelfth to come from Indian financial services in recent years [13].

Peak XV, Groww’s first institutional backer, wrote that through every decision, Keshre “would ask, almost reflexively: ‘What is best for the customer?’” [70]. Keshre’s first shareholder letter told investors that Groww had “not even covered 1% of our journey” [78].

How his wealth is held

Almost all of Keshre’s wealth is his Groww stake. Before the IPO he held 55.91 crore shares, about 9.1% of the company on a fully diluted basis, bought at an average cost of under Rs 2 a share [1]. His three co-founders held between about 4.5% and 6.7% each [1].

He has sold very little. In May 2026, after the six-month lock-in ended, Keshre sold 10 lakh shares worth about Rs 18.6 crore, and the founders and their family trusts together sold about Rs 270 crore worth. Inc42 reported, citing unnamed sources, that the money was meant for startup investments and philanthropy [51]. In FY25 he received Rs 188.6 crore in pay, nearly all of it a one-time performance incentive; from April 2025 his annual cash pay was set at Rs 5 crore [1][68].

After the listing: FY26 and beyond

The first year as a listed company showed both the risk and the resilience of the business. SEBI’s curbs on futures and options trading hit revenue in early FY26 (more on this below), but the company recovered. For FY26 Groww reported revenue from operations of about Rs 4,645 crore and net profit of about Rs 2,083 crore [6]. In the July-September 2026 quarter, its profit rose 54% from a year earlier to about Rs 725 crore, and equity derivatives fell to about 45% of income as other businesses grew [52]. Groww’s investor page in November 2026 reported about 2.4 crore transacting users and customer assets of about Rs 3.7 lakh crore [7].

In September 2026 Groww relaunched US stock investing, this time through GIFT City, after regulator IFSCA approved it [54].

The setbacks and failures

Keshre talks about failure more freely than most founders. “Five products became successful, five failed,” he said in 2025. “Our future depends on the next set of products… And being paranoid helps” [10].

EduFlix (about 2011-13). His first startup shut down because India’s internet was too slow for streaming video [21].
The robo-advisor (2016-17). Groww’s first product failed to win customers, and only 20-30 signed up a month [10].
Four years of no revenue. The company gave its core product away and depended on venture capital to survive [11].
US stocks, first attempt. Groww stopped new US stock purchases in February 2024, blaming the cost and complications of overseas funding and settlement [53]. Keshre publicly called reports of a full shutdown “misinformation” at the time [57]. The product came back in 2026 through GIFT City [54].
The F&O squeeze. SEBI tightened derivatives rules from late 2024. Groww lost about 6 lakh active clients in the first half of 2025, the biggest fall among top brokers [65]. Its operating revenue in the April-June 2025 quarter fell about 10% from a year earlier [66][67].
Outages. The worst came on 23 January 2024, when users could not log in or trade for about an hour during market hours (see below) [55][57].
Post-IPO volatility. The share price swung sharply after listing, including a 10% fall on 19 November 2025 and a fall of about 15% over five sessions after the May 2026 lock-in ended, when early investors sold shares worth about Rs 5,326 crore [45][49][50].

“One phrase we use all the time inside the org is never let any crisis go to waste,” Keshre says [10].

Controversies and allegations

Keshre has not been found guilty of any offence, and Groww’s prospectus reports no SEBI or stock exchange disciplinary action against its promoters in the five years before the IPO [3]. The matters below are regulatory settlements, a pending complaint disclosed in Groww’s own filings, and public disputes. Each is set out with the response and the latest known status.

SEBI inspection findings (settled, 2025)

Allegation: After a comprehensive inspection, SEBI issued a show-cause notice on 25 November 2024 to Groww Invest Tech, Groww’s broking arm (formerly Nextbillion Technology). It alleged 38 instances of wrong ledger or margin figures in client statements. It said the app offered no alternative way to trade or exit positions if it failed. It said lending, bill payments and UPI sat behind the same login as trading, which could expose clients in disputes. And it said Groww did not check whether some clients’ trading matched their declared income [4].

Response: Groww applied to settle the case without admitting or denying the findings [4].

Status: Settled. SEBI passed a settlement order on 14 May 2025 for Rs 47.85 lakh. The case is closed, though SEBI kept the right to reopen it if the terms were breached [4][60][61].

The January 2024 app outage (settled, 2025)

Allegation: On 23 January 2024, Groww users could not log in, see their balances or place orders during market hours. Some users on X said they were losing money on expiring positions and demanded compensation [55][56]. SEBI later alleged that Groww did not report data on the incident to the exchange’s monitoring system that day, had no backup phone-trading line for clients, and ran an ineffective security-testing process [58][59].

Response: Groww apologised on X the same day. Two days later Keshre apologised personally, said the outage lasted about an hour, admitted that communication could have been more proactive, and promised investment in a parallel fallback system [57].

Status: Settled. SEBI’s settlement order of 13 May 2025 closed the case on payment of Rs 34.12 lakh, without admission or denial of the findings [58][59].

A criminal complaint in Lucknow (pending)

Allegation: Groww’s prospectus discloses a first information report (FIR) filed on 14 January 2023 by an individual at Wazirganj police station, Lucknow, under sections of the Indian Penal Code on criminal breach of trust and cheating. It names Groww Invest Tech, all four founders including Keshre, and two employees. The complainant alleged losses caused by app problems, delayed settlement and rights entitlements that were not bought. The amount involved is about Rs 5 lakh [3].

Response: The company denied the allegations [3].

What happened next:

Police filed a closure report in September 2023 [3].
On 7 October 2024 a magistrate rejected the closure report and ordered further investigation [3].

Status: Pending, according to the prospectus dated October 2025. CapitalVia found no later public update. It remains an unproven allegation.

The “fake folio” allegation (June-July 2024)

Allegation: In June 2024 a social-media post, later deleted, claimed that Groww had taken a customer’s money for a mutual fund investment without investing it and had shown a folio number that did not exist [62].

Response: On 3 July 2024 Groww issued a six-point rebuttal. It said faulty registrar data and a duplicate order-ID problem had shown wrong details on the dashboard. It said no money had actually been debited, which BSE’s clearing house confirmed. It credited the amount as a goodwill gesture, which it said was not an admission of liability [63].

Status: Resolved. No regulatory action followed that CapitalVia could find.

Inherited fund-house case (settled, 2024)

Allegation: SEBI alleged that between April 2020 and March 2022 the asset manager had paid expenses that should have been charged to its schemes. This was before Groww bought the company from Indiabulls [64].

Response: Groww AMC and its trustee settled without admitting or denying the findings [64].

Status: Settled on 28 June 2024 for Rs 9 lakh [64].

Founder pay and the IPO valuation debate (2025)

Allegation: In September 2025, reports based on Groww’s updated draft prospectus highlighted that the four founders had received large pay packages in FY25, with Keshre’s Rs 188.6 crore made up almost entirely of a one-time incentive. The same filings showed attrition of about 50% in customer support teams [68]. Separately, some market commentators argued during and after the IPO that the valuation was expensive compared with listed rivals, given the F&O curbs [46][47].

Response: Groww said the support attrition reflected churn that is normal in such roles [68]. The prospectus shows Keshre’s cash pay was cut to Rs 5 crore a year from April 2025 [1].

Status: No regulatory issue. The pay was disclosed and approved, and valuation remains a matter of opinion. CapitalVia takes no view on the stock.

Industry-wide outages and the F&O debate

On 3 June 2024, Groww and Zerodha users could not sell shares during a sharp market rally because the depository CDSL’s verification system was failing. That was a third-party failure that affected the whole industry [69]. More broadly, SEBI studies showing that more than 90% of individual F&O traders lose money have put all discount brokers under scrutiny [66]. Groww has not been singled out by the regulator on this, and has reduced its reliance on derivatives revenue since [52].

Status of all matters as of 3 November 2026.

Giving back

Keshre has not made a large public personal pledge, and CapitalVia found no reported personal donation in his name. Most of the giving so far runs through the Groww Foundation, the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) arm, which follows Groww’s CSR policy covering education, research, skills, health and the environment [74][75].

IIT Bombay. In December 2025 the Groww Foundation partnered with IIT Bombay’s Desai Sethi School of Entrepreneurship to set up a 15,000 sq ft “Groww Innovation Space”, meant to support about 100 student teams a year [74]. IIT Bombay named Keshre a Distinguished Alumnus in 2025 [8].
Women in semiconductors. In March 2026 the foundation backed a “Groww Scholar Program” at IISc Bengaluru’s Centre for Nano Science and Engineering, supporting 160 girls and women in semiconductor training over three years [75].
Financial literacy. Groww’s “Ab India Karega Invest” campaign and its YouTube channel are central to how it grew. In 2021 Keshre said the initiative had educated more than 1 crore people [73].

When the founders sold about Rs 270 crore of shares in May 2026, Inc42 reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that part of the money was for personal philanthropy [51]. Details have not been announced.

Succession

At 45, Keshre is one of the youngest CEOs of a large listed Indian financial company, and succession is not a live question. Groww is run by its four co-founders, who still hold about 27% of the company between them and their trusts [1][51]. The company has a professional board, including a Peak XV nominee and independent directors [3]. What matters more is depth of leadership: Keshre says small, independent product teams run most businesses, with a lean central platform team [11].

What his journey teaches

Your first idea is a hypothesis, not a destiny. Groww’s robo-advisor was elegant and nobody wanted it. The team did not defend it. They spent a year listening to customers and relaunched as a much simpler product, and sign-ups jumped from a few dozen a month to 600 [10].

Delayed monetisation works only if you can survive the delay. Groww earned almost nothing for four years [11]. That was possible because the founders kept costs low and raised money from patient investors. Founders tempted to copy this should first ask how long they can last without revenue.

Small-town India is not a niche, it is the market. A boy who read about the IIT-JEE in a library book built a company where about 70% of users came from outside the big metros [11][30]. Keshre built for the customer he once was.

Owning your mistakes in public builds trust. After the January 2024 outage, Keshre apologised personally and said what would change [57]. Regulators still penalised the lapses, but the company addressed them openly. In a business that holds people’s savings, trust is the product.

Boring compounding beats hyperactivity, in investing and in companies. “Lot of wealth is built by just being boring,” Keshre told NPCI. “Do SIP. Just keep watching” [11]. He applies the same patience to Groww: he has sold only a small fraction of his own shares since listing [51].

Don’t stop at one product. The F&O curbs showed how risky it was to depend on one source of revenue, a concentration Groww’s own prospectus had flagged [3]. Within a year, equity derivatives had fallen to under half of income as lending, margin trading, wealth and asset management grew [52].

For more on how markets and brokers work, see CapitalVia’s Insights.

A profile for general reading, based on public records and reporting as of 3 November 2026. Not investment, tax or legal advice.