Nithin Kamath was born in Shivamogga, Karnataka, in 1979. At 17 he was managing his father's trading account, and his father, a Canara Bank employee, gave him his first seed capital.
After the dotcom crash around 2001, he lost roughly Rs 5 lakh. He took a call-centre job and traded in the mornings. From 2004 he worked as a sub-broker with Kamath Associates.
In August 2010 he founded Zerodha with his brother Nikhil. The firm charged flat fees and built its own trading platform, Kite. With no paid marketing, it became India's largest retail broker by active clients in 2019.
Zerodha stayed private and bootstrapped. In FY25 it reported revenue of Rs 8,847 crore and a net profit of Rs 4,237 crore, both lower than the year before. In 2023 it launched a fund house with Smallcase, and in 2026 it added a merchant banking licence.