The euphoria came even as market analysts remained divided on the sustainability of the stock’s rise as the market could face resistance around its all-time-high and with regulatory risks hovering on options trading over time.
At ₹79,547 crore market capitalization on Wednesday’s closing, the value of Billionbrains Garage Ventures Ltd, which is less than a decade old, eclipsed the combined ₹70,000 crore market value of listed peers Angel One, Anand Rathi Share and Stock Brokers, 5 Paisa, Nuvama and JM Financial, a Mint analysis showed.
Being one of the most profitable new-age companies to hit the bourses in the recent past had a part to play in the exuberant investor response. Another reason why the online-first company saw a pop on the listing day is because of the conservative pricing of the IPO, a banker who helped manage the IPO said. “The founders were clear they wanted to be seen leaving enough on the table. There was headroom to hike the price, but they chose not to,” he added.
Co-founder and CEO Lalit Keshre, who wears his small town upbringing on his sleeve, had that going public for a business like Groww’s signals a lot more accountability, trust, and responsibility into the system.
“This especially helps given that we have also entered newer segments like wealth, bonds and commodities in recent times,” Keshre said in an interview with Mint before the listing. Keshre, born to a farmer in a Madhya Pradesh village, graduated from IIT Bombay, one of India’s premier engineering institutes. Groww was founded in 2016 by Keshre, Harsh Jain, Neeraj Singh and Ishan Bansal.
The company is backed by investors such as Satya Nadella, Y Combinator, Peak XV, Ribbit Capital, GW-E Ribbit Opportunity Fund, Tiger Global and Kauffman Fellows Fund, Alkeon Capital, Propel Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital Global.
The company is betting big on wealth management and lending, apart from its bread-and-butter broking business, to be the cash cows going forward, Keshre told Mint. “The broking side also looks promising. We are seeing good traction in our recently launched products including MTFs, commodities and bonds,” Keshre added.
The online broking firm, which has a market share of 26.3% among retail investors, competes with the likes of Zerodha and Angel One. In the previous fiscal year, Groww’s profit jumped over threefold to ₹1,819 crore while revenue rose 31% from FY24 to ₹4,056 crore, data from its offer documents showed.
Revenues from broking services (stocks and derivatives) at ₹719 crore contributed 79% to revenue from operations in the quarter ended June 2025. Other revenue from margin trade funding, consumer credits and asset management contributed 20.5% to revenue from operations, up from 12.6% from a year ago.
Markets unsure
Analysts were cautious. “The market, especially the capital markets theme, regained some of its mojo, which catapulted Groww, but it could face resistance around its all-time highs as we saw last month. This could hit stocks that have risen sharply in the preceding sessions and cap their gains,” said Ambareesh Baliga, an independent market analyst.
To be sure, the Nifty 50 benchmark, which had fallen from a one-year high of 26,104.2 on 23 October to 25,492.30 on Friday, has since recovered 1.5% to close at 25,875.8 on Wednesday as hopes grew of an Indo-US tariff deal, which raised bullish sentiment, per analysts.
Capital market stocks like BSE surged 5% to ₹2,775.4 after positing a 61% year-on-year rise in Q2 earnings declared on Tuesday. This had a rub-off effect on CDSL and Angel One, which rose 3.3% and 1.4% each.
The Nifty 50 hit a record high of 26,277.35 on 27 September last year, before plunging 17% to a low of 21,743.65 on 7 April this year. From there it recovered to 26,104 last month, but faltered just shy of its record high from there on profit taking.
However, Rajesh Palviya, head of research at Axis Securities, expects the Groww stock to outperform, given the growing cult of equity investing since the pandemic. “I believe the stock will continue to attract interest as it’s only one of a few listed online brokers with the biggest client base,” Palviya added.
As of October end, Groww had the largest client base of over 12 million clients, followed by Zerodha (7.02 million), Angel One (6.85 million), Upstox (2.2 million) and ICICI Securities (1.98 million) as of October-end, per NSE data.
SK Joshi, consultant at Khambatta Securities, too, said that the capital market theme would continue to attract investor interest and listed broking firms would continue “to do well”.
Joshi cited the growing investor base of NSE, India’s largest stock exchange, whose unique PANs had grown almost fourfold to 120.3 million in the fiscal year through September (H1FY26) from 31 million in FY20.
However, a broker requesting anonymity said that having the largest client base would also mean a lower revenue per client, which could be a disadvantage vis-à-vis a peer with a lower client base.
“Any changes to weekly expiries by the regulator could also have an element of risk, though Groww is growing other product lines like MTF, etc,” he added. MTFs refer to margin trading facility.