Nikhil Kamath

About Nikhil Kamath

Nikhil Kamath's first job was in a call centre. He traded equities on the side, which is the part that mattered. He was born on 5 September 1986 in Shimoga, Karnataka, and raised in Bengaluru in a Kannada-Konkani family. His father, Raghuram Kamath, was an executive at Canara Bank. His mother, Revathi Kamath, ran her own event management company — handling events for HP and Bosch at the Leela Palace and Windsor Manor — and later built a landscaping business whose projects included the Chinnaswamy Stadium and clients such as Intel, CBRE and Citadel. She also played the veena. In 2006 he became a sub-broker and set up Kamath & Associates with his elder brother Nithin, managing high-net-worth portfolios in the public markets. What followed was Zerodha, the retail brokerage the two of them built around a discount model — a flat fee instead of a percentage commission — which reset the price of trading in India and made both brothers billionaires without a rupee of outside funding. As of December 2025, Forbes put Nikhil's net worth at $3.3 billion; both brothers appeared on Forbes' India's 100 Richest list for 2024. He has since built outward from broking rather than deeper into it. True Beacon, founded in 2020, manages money for ultra-high-net-worth investors through privately pooled vehicles. Gruhas, co-founded with Abhijeet Pai in 2021, invests in early and growth-stage companies across climate tech, consumer brands, senior care, sustainability and proptech, through two funds — the Gruhas Collective Consumer Fund and the Earth Fund, run in partnership with Brigade Group. His personal portfolio runs from Licious and Ather to InCred, RDC Concrete, GreenLine Mobility and Nazara Technologies, and he holds a 5% stake in D'yavol Spirits. In March 2024 he started a podcast called 'WTF is'. By December 2025 the guest list read like a cross-section of global power and Indian enterprise: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Bill Gates, Netflix's Ted Sarandos, YouTube's Neal Mohan, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, A. R. Rahman, Ronnie Screwvala, Ritesh Agarwal and Elon Musk, among many others. It has become, incidentally, one of the more effective pieces of business media in India — made by someone with no media background at all. The part that is easiest to overlook: in June 2023 he signed The Giving Pledge, committing to give away at least half his wealth to causes in climate change, education and healthcare. Sources: English Wikipedia (biography, career, investments and philanthropy, accessed August 2026), citing Forbes for net worth and rankings; zerodha.com and truebeacon.com. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Basic Information

Co-founder, Zerodha; Co-founder, True Beacon and Gruhas

Company Details

Zerodha

Financial services — retail broking, asset management and venture investing

Related Business Owner

Ronnie Screwvala

Media & Entertainment

Nandan Nilekani

Information Technology

Nithin Kamath

Financial Services

Anupam Mittal

Internet & Consumer Tech