Lalit Keshre is co-founder and chief executive of Groww, the app that lets Indian investors buy mutual funds, stocks, ETFs and IPOs in one place. An IIT Bombay engineer and former Flipkart product leader, he quit his job in 2016 with three colleagues to make investing simple for the millions of Indians who had never tried it.
IIT Bombay and Early Start-Ups
He earned a dual degree in electrical engineering from IIT Bombay in 2004 and was an early team member at Ittiam Systems. In 2011 he founded Eduflix, an online learning company.
Product at Flipkart
At Flipkart he held a senior product management role, launching and leading Flipkart Quick and helping launch Flipkart Marketplace. There he worked alongside Harsh Jain, Ishan Bansal and Neeraj Singh, who became his co-founders.
The Next 180 Million
From their own experience and that of friends, the four found investing in India too complex and opaque. Close to 200 million Indians had investable income, but only about 20 million invested. The only way to bring the rest in, they concluded, was to make it simple. They spent a long time studying users' pain points and experimenting with the design, and because people's savings were at stake, building a safe product took time.
Groww started operations in 2017 as a platform for direct mutual funds and within a year was one of the country's most popular. Stocks followed in early 2020, then digital gold, ETFs, intraday trading and IPOs. Y Combinator, Ribbit Capital and Tiger Global were among its backers, and a $251 million round in October 2021 valued it at $3 billion.
A Listed Company
Groww is now publicly traded in India. In the quarter to June 2026 its revenue rose 66% to about $158.1M, and customers held about $37.9B on the platform. In 2024 he won the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award in the start-up category.
He left a secure job at India's largest e-commerce company because investing seemed built for the few. A decade later the app he started for first-time investors holds tens of billions of dollars of ordinary Indians' savings.
