Founder of India’s top broker Groww joins billionaire financial elites

[MUMBAI] The initial public offering of Groww, India’s answer to Robinhood Markets, was the culmination of almost a decade’s hustle for engineer and entrepreneur Lalit Keshre.

Now, just days after the investment platform’s stock debut, the 44-year-old has joined a growing list of around a dozen financial billionaires to be minted in India, driven by a boom in demand for investing.

Shares of parent company Billionbrains Garage Ventures have soared over its first six trading sessions, making it the most valuable stock broker in the country at around US$11 billion at the end of trading on Thursday (Nov 20). That has given Keshre a net worth of about US$1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His three co-founders collectively own just under about US$2 billion of stock in the company.

The entrepreneur is just the latest to amass a fortune from the boom in India that’s fuelling the rise of a new class of ultra-rich in finance.

Millions of Indians are joining the working population and investing more, while bigger money managers and family offices are pumping cash into equity markets.

Groww’s IPO last week also adds to a slew of listings in the finance industry. Shadow banks like Tata Capital and HDB Financial Services recently listed, while shares of payment platform Pine Labs surged on its debut last Friday.

General Atlantic-backed financial app PhonePe and Prosus NV-backed payments platform PayU also plan stock market listings next year.

India, which has overtaken China as the world’s most populous nation, now counts about 917,000 millionaires, according to a recent UBS report, up by about 39,000 last year. That makes it one of the fastest-growing countries for wealth creation. Among the latest round are scores of founders, top executives and employees who have sold shares and stock options.

The country’s buoyant IPO market has been a big driver of the boom. India has raised around US$76 billion in equity capital in the last five years from nearly 1,200 companies, as it drew foreign capital that had fled from China’s crackdown on private enterprise.

Financial services companies, asset managers, shadow banks, insurance firms and financial-technology, or fintech firms have dominated, raising more than US$22 billion since 2020, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Keshre is the twelfth billionaire to emerge from India’s financial services industry in recent years in a list that includes Kotak Mahindra Bank founder Uday Kotak, the founding family of Muthoot Finance and market veterans Raamdeo Agrawal and Motilal Oswal of Motilal Oswal Financial Services.

More recently, One 97 Communications or Paytm’s CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma and AU Small Finance Bank Ltd’s CEO Sanjay Aggarwal joined the list.

India’s richest stock brokers are Nithin Kamath and Nikhil Kamath, whose Zerodha Broking is valued at around US$5.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The two brothers are seen as pioneers of India’s discount brokerage back in the 2010s. Much akin to Robinhood Markets’ rise in the US, Zerodha stole market share from legacy brokerages among retail traders and first-time investors.

An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Keshre worked in the product team at Walmart-backed Flipkart before setting up Groww along with three others in 2016.

Groww’s parent raised about US$752 million in an initial public offering that was backed by some of world’s biggest money managers, including funds managed by Goldman Sachs Group, Morgan Stanley and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. BLOOMBERG