Nithin Kamath: Entrepreneur who made the stock market easy for millennials
Zerodha Broking Ltd. provides financial services including retail and institutional brokerage, bonds, currency and commodities trading, and mutual funds. The company was established in 2010 by Nithin Kamath and has offices in many significant Indian cities. Its headquarters are in Bengaluru.
Early Life
Nithin took over his father’s brokerage account when he was 17 years old. He worked for himself as a propriety broker from 1997 to 2004 while continuing his college studies. Due to a shortage of trading cash, he spent three years working at a call center after investing a significant amount of time as a stock broker.
He traded throughout the day and worked nights doing telesales. From 2001 to 2004, he was employed by Senior Telesales Executive, a business that specialized in call centers. When Nithin joined Kamath Associates as a propriety trader, he began his professional trading career as a sub-broker. It essentially served as Reliance Money’s franchisee.
Additionally, he inferred portfolio advisory services. He was employed by the firm from January 2004 until January 2010, a period of six years. By the end of 2010, Nithin Kamath and his younger brother Nikhil established their own stock trading company, Zerodha.
Success Story
Nithin Kamath is the co-founder and CEO of Zerodha, India’s largest trading firm. Since common traders rushed to stock markets during the pandemic, its platform now facilitates over 15% of India’s retail trades. Kamath was a school dropout and started trading at the age of 17. He started stock trading after being inspired by his older brother, Nithin, and self-taught himself while doing so. It went well, and soon the two were making investments for friends and family.
However, they discovered that the method was too complicated along the road. The Bangalore-born brothers got to work and invested their savings in the creation of a straightforward and cost-effective brokerage platform for regular investors. In 2010, the established Zerodha. Today, the company has not accepted any outside investment, unlike the majority of startups.
Since then, as India’s thirst for assets outside of gold and real estate has increased, Zerodha has expanded by word-of-mouth. All of that, however, changed in 2020 due to the pandemic when the company’s customers reached over four million. In 2020, the Zerodha platform’s average investor’s age dropped from 32 to 30 years old.
This has been compared to the American trading app Robinhood, which saw a comparable increase in young users during the pandemic. This has been compared to the American trading app Robinhood, which saw a comparable increase in young users during the pandemic. The Kamath brothers joined the Forbes India Rich List in October 2020 with a combined net worth of $1.55 billion, Zerodha entered the “unicorn club” in June 2020 with a self-evaluation of roughly $1 billion.
The ESOP buyback exercise that the business did was the basis for this valuation, which valued each stock at more than four times the market price of Rs. 700/share. Zerodha established an early-stage fund Rainmatter in 2014 with a capital of Rs. 50 Crore.
The fund concentrated on risk mitigation but focused on funding start-ups in the area of innovative technology and novel product development by limiting the ticket value to under $ 1 million for each investment. Some significant start-ups in which Rainmatter has invested include Smallcase, Cred, Finception, and Sensibull.
In 2019, Zerodha introduced True Beacon, an AIF that uses a defensive investment approach to deliver returns in choppy markets. In its first year, the $2 million minimum investment fund was able to achieve a return of more than 13%. Zerodha submitted a license application in 2020 to establish an AMC mutual fund in India.
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