Nitin Kamath
It is said that a big amount is required to start a big business. People take loans from the bank or raise money from rich investors. But Zerodha’s founder Nitin Kamath did not do all this. He started the company for just 10 lakh rupees and today the same company has become about 30 thousand crores. The special thing is that he did not take a loan from anyone in this journey, neither a big investor added nor did he go to the stock market and brought IPO.
Kamath himself told the whole story
Recently, Nitin Kamath told his story in a post on social media. He told that someone asked him online, “What did you do in Zerodha, which is running in a company without any funding?” Responding to this, Kamath wrote that people forget that they have spent 25 years in the stock market. Even before starting zerodha, he had traded for 10 years. Then started Zerodha and brought it to this point in the last 15 years. According to him, when you do some work for a long time, its effect is slowly visible. It is called compounding, that is, the fruit of hard work increases manifold with time.
Someone on Reddit Asked What does Zerodha Do Differently, How are we profitable, why don’t iPo etc. This is what i replied:
Hmmm… so you forget that we have spent 15 years getting here. And Maybe Another 10 years, Before Zerodha, I was involved in the markets in some form. So,
– nithin kamath (@nithin0dha) September 16, 2025
How to do the standing?
Kamath said that when he started zerodha, an exchange deposit of Rs 90 lakh had to be given to enter the market. Nevertheless, he did not give up and used each money thoughtfully. He first made an affordable website on which Rs 2.5 lakh was spent. Then a small office was prepared which cost Rs 5 lakh. The remaining 2.5 lakh rupees are invested in other important things.
Initially, he used a free trading platform named NSE Now, which gets free to brokers from the National Stock Exchange. Apart from this, for the back office work, there was also a vendor who was getting his system tested, so no expenses were spent.
Simplicity from parents, savings learned from childhood
Kamath said that he comes from a common middle class family. His father was a manager in the bank and mother used to teach music. There was never a wasteful expenditure in the house. He says that there was no rich relative, nor any family business. Whatever he did, he did it on his own. For this reason, the expenses kept spending thoughtfully and kept the company ahead without borrowing.
Increased flight of zerodha with India’s progress
Kamath believes that a big reason for Zerodha’s success was that his company was formed when India was moving fast. He said, “We were present with the right thing at the right place at the right time. This was the biggest difference.” To explain the importance of this opportunity, he gave an example of Jensen Huang, owner of NVidia Company, who continued to struggle for years, but when the right time came, his company began to be counted among the world’s largest tech companies.
The biggest advantage without investor
Kamath says that there is no external pressure on his company today, because he did not take money from anyone. There is no investor, nor any stock market pressure. Therefore, whatever decisions they take, they are for the benefit of their customers and employees, not to increase profits. With this thinking, he made a policy like no spam and no tracking in Zerodha. That is, neither send messages to customers again and again, nor keep an eye on their antics.