Nithin Kamath

Early life

Kamath was born in Shivamogga in Karnataka and grew up in a Konkani household. His father worked at Canara Bank and his mother taught the veena, and the family moved to Bengaluru in 1996. He has one younger brother, Nikhil, who later became his business partner.^[1]

He began trading at seventeen, using his father's account, and spent the years around 1997 to 2004 as a proprietary trader. To support the habit he took a job as a senior tele-sales associate at a call centre, trading during market hours and working night shifts. He has spoken about those years as the reason he does not take the overnight success framing of his own story seriously.^[1][7]

Milestones

1. 1997 to 2004Self employed proprietary trader, alongside a call centre job from 2001.
2. 2004 to 2010Sub broker for Kamath Associates, a Reliance Money franchise, advising clients and trading his own book.
3. 2010Co-founds Zerodha with his brother Nikhil.
4. 2015Zerodha drops brokerage on equity delivery trades.
5. 2019Zerodha becomes the largest retail broker in India by active clients.

Building Zerodha

Kamath and his brother started Zerodha with their own savings, no venture capital and software they largely wrote in house. The model was to charge clients a flat, visible fee instead of a percentage commission, and to make the platform self service so that a small support team could handle a very large client base.^[2]

The firm's pricing decisions, including charging nothing for equity delivery trades in 2015, brought in retail investors at a scale Indian brokers had not seen, and pushed the industry towards price competition. By 2019 it had become the largest broker in the country by active clients.^[3]

Kamath is unusual among founders of his size in staying personally visible: he writes on X about markets, mental health, fitness and the risks of derivatives trading, and much of Zerodha's public communication runs through that account rather than through advertising.^[1]

Education as strategy

Varsity, the firm's free library of market education, began as a set of internal notes and became one of the most widely read resources for Indian retail investors. Kamath's stated reasoning is that a firm which earns from transactions has an interest in customers who understand what they are doing, and that education is cheaper than marketing.^[4]

Investing and philanthropy

• Rainmatter, which invests in financial technology and consumer companies from Zerodha's balance sheet.^[4]
• Rainmatter Foundation, which gives grants for climate, air quality, water and livelihood work.
• Forbes has listed Kamath among India's richest, alongside his brother and family, on the strength of the brokerage.^[3][8]