Zerodha

Zerodha Broking Limited is an Indian financial services company (a member of NSE, BSE, MCX), that offers retail and institutional broking, currencies and commodities trading, mutual funds, and bonds. Founded in 2010, the company is headquartered in Bangalore and has physical presence in several major Indian cities.
As of December 2020, Zerodha was the largest retail stockbroker in India by active client base, and contributes upwards of 15% of daily retail volumes across Indian stock exchanges.
In June 2020, Zerodha entered the unicorn club with a self-assessed valuation of about $1 billion. This valuation was based on the ESOP buyback exercise the company undertook valuing each share at more than four times of the book value of ₹700 per share.
History.
Zerodha was founded on 15 August 2010 by brothers Nithin Kamath and Nikhil Kamath. The name "Zerodha" is a portmanteau of words "Zero" and "Rodha" (Sanskrit word for "barrier").
Business model.
Delivery equity is free for all customers. However, for Intraday trading, a flat fee of a maximum of ₹20 is applied to trade, irrespective of its size, and it offers an array of purpose-built trading applications to its retail customers.
Corporate affairs.
Zerodha has a client base of 4 million users as of December 2020. The company offers commodities trading via its wholly owned subsidiary, Zerodha Commodities Pvt. Ltd.
Zerodha won the "Economic Times Startup Awards 2016" in the "Bootstrap Champ" category. The company also won the BSE-D&B "Emerging Equity Broking House" award in 2014 and 2015, and the NSE "Retail Broker of the Year" in 2018. Zerodha has also won the "Economic Times Startup Awards 2020" in the "Startup of the Year" category.
Rainmatter.
Founded in 2014, Rainmatter was founded as an early-stage fund with a corpus of ₹50 Crore. By keeping the ticket size lower than $1 million per investment, the fund has focused on minimizing risk but focus on funding start-ups in the field of new technology and new product development. Some notable investments of Rainmatter are in start-ups like Digio, Learnapp, Finception, Smallcase, Sensibull Quicko, and ERPNext.
True Beacon and Mutual Fund AMC.
In 2019, Zerodha started True Beacon, the Alternative Investment Fund focused on giving returns in volatile markets through their defensive investment strategy. The $2 million minimum investment fund has been able to generate a return of 26.6% in its first year. In 2020, Zerodha has applied for a license to establish a Mutual Fund AMC in India.
Criticism.
Technical glitches and outages.
There have been multiple reports of technical issues including glitches, system outages and connectivity problems on Zerodha's Kite platform, especially on days with high market volatility and F&O expiry days.
In November 2020, Livemint reported that some of Zerodha's traders complained of not being able to sign into its Kite platform due to a technical issue. Several users posted on Twitter to report log-in problem. Zerodha, in an official statement, acknowledged the issue. Also there has been a constant comparison with another discount broker named Upstox, which is another prominent name as far as discount brokers in India are concerned. 