In the late 1990s Nithin Kamath worked in Weekender showrooms and tried multi-level marketing. At seventeen he was already trading stocks, managing his father's account. His father, a Canara Bank man, gave him the first seed money to trade with. Years later Nithin would say, "None of the success that's ascribed to us would have happened without my father," and call him "our VC".
Profiles place the Kamaths in a middle-class Konkani family that moved around with the father's bank postings and settled in Bangalore in 1996. Nithin's early trading went well, then it did not. Interviews recount that after the dotcom crash, around 2001-02, he lost roughly ₹5 lakh, money he had built up by the time he finished engineering. He took a call-centre job to pay the bills and traded in the mornings. He has said those call-centre days were some of the most fun of his life.
An early client who had seen Nithin's trading record handed him ₹25 lakh to manage.
He crawled back. In the mid-2000s he became a sub-broker for Reliance Money, and when the market crashed again in 2008 he came out with enough to start something of his own. In 2010 he put together roughly ₹2 crore, part his savings and part from a friend in Singapore, and opened Zerodha with his brother Nikhil. Operations began on 15 August 2010, and the name joins "Zero" to "Rodha", the Sanskrit word for barrier. Nikhil, seven years younger, had been trading at 15 or 16, and Nithin realised early that his brother was "a better trader than I am". His first email about the venture set a target of 10,000 customers, after which, he wrote, they would have arrived in life. The first couple of years were slow. Nithin has said Nikhil's trading profits were what kept them in the game, and the company lost no money in that stretch.
Then the surprise: nobody advertised. An early client who had seen Nithin's trading record handed him ₹25 lakh to manage. "I made money for him, and then more customers started getting on board," Nithin recalled. Word of mouth did the rest. Zerodha took no venture capital, and the Kamath family still owns all of it. Seema Patil has led quality since the beginning, and Karthik Rangappa wrote Varsity, the education programme, single-handedly. Kailash Nadh joined as CTO in 2013, and the in-house Kite platform made a flat fee sustainable.
The price has been public embarrassment. Kite has buckled on volatile days and futures-and-options expiry days, and the company acknowledged a login failure in November 2020. Groww overtook it by active clients, reaching about 23% share by April 2024.
Today Zerodha is a private company that is still large and unusually profitable: ₹8,847 crore revenue and ₹4,237 crore net profit in FY25, though both fell from the year before. Around the broking business the brothers built Rainmatter, True Beacon, a mutual fund house and a $1 million-a-year open-source fund.
What stands out is how little of it was planned. A teenager managing his father's account, a young man who lost five lakh rupees and sat in a call centre, a brother whose trades paid the bills. Nithin's own summary is that "luck is a big part of any success in life." For a first-time founder the more useful part may be the order of events: he lost his own money first, and only then started a firm that charged other traders less.