Meet Lalit Keshre, son of a farmer whose company overtook Zerodha as India's largest stockbroker

Groww had 6.63 million active investors as compared to Zerodha’s 6.48 million.

Bengaluru-based fintech startup Groww has officially surpassed top brokerage company Zerodha with a higher number of active investors. However, this feat was not very easy to achieve. The platform, which makes investing easy for people, was started in 2016 by four Flipkart executives – Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain, Ishan Bansal and Neeraj Singh.

Moreover, Keshre came from a very humble background. In a conversation with Moneycontrol’s Chandra R Srikanth at the Groww office in Bengaluru last year, Keshre revealed that his father is a farmer in a small village called Lepa in Madhya Pradesh. His parents still live there.

Keshre lived with his grandparents and also went to the only English-medium school in Khargone district of Madhya Pradesh.

After finishing 12th standard, Keshre got to know about Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) and was able to secure a seat at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. “Lot of luck,” Keshre said.

Keshre worked at e-commerce platform Flipkart and quit in 2016 to start Groww with three other Flipkart employees. Initially, he was working as one of the first product managers and looking over Flipkart Marketplace.

Meanwhile, Groww makes investing in stocks, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, IPOs, US stocks, futures and options, fixed deposits and gold, easy for users. The platform counts Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global as its investors.

Figures by the National Stock Exchange of India Limited (NSE) showed Groww had 6.63 million active investors as compared to Zerodha’s 6.48 million at the end of September.

At the end of FY23, Zerodha, India's largest discount broker by revenue,  grew to 6.39 million customers, while Groww had 5.37 million. Groww has witnessed substantial growth, going from approximately 0.78 million users in FY21 to 3.85 million in FY22 and 5.78 million investors in FY23.