Beyond broking: What next for Groww?
₹1,278 crore in revenue in 2022-23, up 264% from ₹350.9 crore a year ago. Net profit jumped to ₹449 crore from a loss of ₹239 crore during the same period. In India’s burgeoning online investment market, which aims to make investing accessible and transparent to everyone, Groww competes not just with Zerodha, but also with Angel One Ltd, Upstox and other stockbrokers.
Groww’s ambition, however, is to do much more. The firm, which started with mutual fund distribution and later got into stockbroking, has ventured into new business verticals such as credit and payments, with more diversification plans in the pipeline. In 2015-end, Harsh Jain, Neeraj Singh, Lalit Keshre and Ishan Bansal, who were executives at e-commerce firm Flipkart, decided to start up.
The choice of business was unanimous: financial services. Flipkart at that point was already set to disrupt India’s e-commerce arena. When the four friends set up Groww, the aspiration was similar: to do what Flipkart had done in e-commerce.
Groww was launched in 2016 with a simple mutual fund distribution product. In April 2018, it started offering direct mutual funds with zero commission. Once it launched stocks in June 2020, targeting do-it-yourself (DIY) young investors, things moved fast.
During the lockdown, discount broking firms such as Groww benefited hugely, with a record number of demat accounts opened on smartphones by people wanting to take a shot at stock markets. Groww witnessed rapid growth and opened about 2 million demat accounts. Then, in 2021, a record year for fund-raising by tech startups, Groww turned unicorn, after raising $83 million in a round led by Tiger Global.
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