Groww Has Twice As Many Users As Zerodha — So Why Is It Still Earning Less?

Groww started out in 2017 as a simple app to buy mutual funds. Today, it is one of India's biggest investment platforms, with 1.31 crore active broking clients and a listing on the stock exchange that values the company at roughly ₹1.24 lakh crore (about $14 billion) — that's close to what India spends building an entire metro rail line in a large city.

But there's a quiet shift happening under the hood. For years, Groww made most of its money from stockbroking and trading in futures and options (F&O — contracts that let investors bet on whether a stock's price will rise or fall, without owning the stock itself). That is now changing, and the company is deliberately building other ways to earn.

How Big Is The Gap With Zerodha?

Groww's numbers for FY26 (the financial year ending March 2026) look strong on paper. Operating revenue rose 19% to ₹4,644.6 crore, and net profit grew 14% to ₹2,083 crore, even as regulators tightened F&O rules and raised taxes on trading.

But size on the client side hasn't yet translated into a lead over its biggest rival, Zerodha. Groww has nearly double the number of active broking clients compared to Zerodha's 68.47 lakh. Yet Zerodha still earns about 1.9 times more revenue and roughly 2.1 times more profit than Groww.

That gap has actually narrowed — a year earlier, it stood at about 2.3 times on both counts — mainly because Zerodha's own growth has slowed down, with its FY26 profit rising just 1.2% to ₹4,283 crore and revenue staying flat at around ₹8,847 crore.

Closing that remaining gap is now central to Groww's strategy for the next few years. And it isn't the only one trying: Zerodha itself is pushing into lending, asset management, and has applied for a merchant banking licence to diversify its own income.

The Numbers Behind The Shift

Here's a clear sign of the change already under way: in the April-June quarter of FY26 (Q1 FY26), stocks and F&O trading together made up 75.7% of Groww's total income. By the same quarter a year later (Q1 FY27), that share had dropped to 68.4%.

This doesn't mean broking is shrinking — it's still growing in absolute terms. It simply means Groww's newer businesses are growing faster, so they now make up a bigger slice of a bigger overall pie.

Brokerage firm Motilal Oswal expects this trend to continue, projecting Groww's revenue could roughly double between FY25 and FY28 to around ₹7,980 crore, with broking still contributing 67% of that by FY28. Worth noting: that's only a shade below the 68.4% share broking already holds today — so even by the brokerage's own optimistic math, the shift is happening gradually, not dramatically. And going by Groww's current quarterly run-rate, revenue would need to jump sharply to actually hit that ₹7,980 crore target.

From A Broking Licence To A Financial Super App

Groww's journey into a full-fledged financial platform began after it picked up its broking licence in March 2020 and entered stockbroking that June. It turned profitable for the first time in FY21, with a modest net profit of ₹2.72 crore, and went on to raise $251 million in October 2021 at a $3 billion valuation.

Along the way, Groww restructured its ownership — moving its US-based holding company to merge with its India-based entity — to align with plans for a domestic stock market listing. That restructuring triggered a one-time US tax bill of ₹1,339.7 crore in FY24, which pushed the company into a net loss of ₹805 crore that year, despite otherwise running profitably. It bounced back to profit in FY25.

Since then, Groww has added a long list of products: equity and commodity derivatives, margin trading (borrowing money from the broker to buy more shares than your own funds allow), intraday trading, personal loans, and loans against securities. Some experiments didn't work — it shut down fixed deposits and an earlier US stock-investing product — but it's now preparing to relaunch international investing through GIFT City, India's new financial hub.

It has also grown through acquisitions: buying Indiabulls' asset management business in 2023 for ₹175.6 crore (giving it the licence to run its own mutual funds), and acquiring wealth-tech platform Fisdom in 2025 for ₹961.05 crore.

Margin Trading Is The Strongest New Growth Engine

Among Groww's newer businesses, margin trading facility (MTF) stands out. Its contribution to total income jumped from 3% to 8% between Q1 FY26 and Q1 FY27 — roughly ₹124 crore on Groww's reported income base.

The numbers behind that growth are striking: Groww's MTF book — the total amount customers have borrowed to trade — surged 264% year-on-year to ₹3,775 crore, up from ₹1,036 crore. Its share of the industry's total MTF business rose from 1.2% to 2.7%.

That's still well below Groww's 15.1% share of overall stock-trading volumes, which tells you there's plenty of room to sell this product to its existing customers who aren't using it yet. Interestingly, the number of active MTF users held steady at about 1.3 lakh — so most of the growth came from existing users borrowing more, not new users signing up.

For comparison, Zerodha's MTF book stood at around ₹9,000 crore in FY26, with customers actually drawing down about ₹6,000 crore of it, while Angel One's book was ₹5,450 crore. MTF already contributes about 10% of Zerodha's revenue.

This isn't risk-free money for Groww, though. Zerodha founder Nithin Kamath has publicly flagged the danger in this kind of lending-fuelled growth: leverage looks great when markets are rising, but the risks only show up when markets fall. Groww charges 14.95% annual interest on MTF, on top of brokerage and other charges, and its funding book will need careful risk management as it scales — especially with regulatory rules on broker lending still evolving.

Commodities And Lending Are Smaller, But Growing

Groww only entered commodity trading in October 2025, and it's scaling up fast. Active users in this segment grew from 2.55 lakh to 3.93 lakh to 4.35 lakh across three consecutive quarters, and its share of total income rose from 3.5% to 4.9% — about ₹76 crore in Q1 FY27. Groww has already captured 28.6% of retail commodity derivatives trading volumes across India's two big commodity exchanges.

Personal loans and loans against securities (where customers borrow money by pledging their stocks or mutual funds as collateral) contributed 5.5% of total income in Q1 FY27, or about ₹85 crore — up from ₹62.6 crore a year earlier. But this segment's share of total income actually fell slightly compared to a year ago, since the rest of the business is growing even faster. Loans against securities are becoming a bigger piece of Groww's lending book, now making up about a third of all loans it disburses.

Groww's asset management arm — where it earns fees for running its own mutual funds — could become a bigger story over time. US financial giant State Street agreed in January 2026 to buy a 23% stake in Groww's asset management company for ₹580 crore, valuing the unit at about ₹2,500 crore, even though it's currently loss-making. Groww has said it needs to grow this business's assets five to six times over before it turns profitable.

Growing Fast Comes With Its Own Risks

Building several new businesses at once isn't free of friction. Groww has already faced a costly reminder of this: a trading outage in January 2024 stopped users from placing orders and led to a ₹34.12 lakh settlement with market regulator SEBI, without Groww admitting or denying wrongdoing. It also faced investor criticism in 2024 over mismatches in mutual fund holdings and unit pricing.

Stricter regulation is squeezing the F&O business across the industry — not just for Groww, but for rivals like Zerodha and Angel One too — which is exactly why all three are racing to build income sources beyond trading commissions.

The real test for Groww now isn't just launching new products — it's turning them into steady, meaningful revenue without breaking the low-cost model that made its core trading business profitable in the first place. Fisdom and its asset management unit are still losing money, which is a reminder that new businesses don't automatically inherit the profitability of the parent platform. Whether Groww can scale multiple businesses at once — without straining its capital, management bandwidth and compliance systems — will decide how quickly it closes the gap with Zerodha.