Co-Founder & Chief Investment Officer, True Beacon & Zerodha
Nikhil started equity trading at the age of 17, having dropped out of school two years earlier to play chess for India. He largely focused on the emerging derivatives and commodity sectors, before co-founding Kamath Associates at the age of 19 to manage High Net Worth Individual portfolios in public markets.
In 2010, at the age of 23, he co-founded Zerodha with his brother, Nithin. The company aimed to revolutionize Indian financial market access by adopting a transparent, ultra-low fee with a proprietary tech-driven strategy. With over three million users, Zerodha is now the country’s largest retail brokerage platform. It facilitates orders worth 10 billion US dollars per day, which accounts for about 15% of the daily equity volume in India.
Headquartered in Asia’s IT hub, Bangalore, funded entirely by Nikhil and Nithin, the company has a valuation of over 2 billion US dollars. Through its incubator and VC fund, Rainmatter, Zerodha aggressively invests in fintech companies to drive innovation aimed at bringing financial inclusion across India.
Nikhil’s passion for analytics and financial markets stems from his unorthodox childhood. Until 2019, his focus was on generating superior returns for the Kamath proprietary fund, which over the past decade has achieved an average of 55% post-tax year on year performance.