In 2008, a visit to a small brokerage office in Jabalpur gave Ravi Kumar a clear view of a gap. Traders were manually arbitraging between the NSE and BSE, executing strategies that had long been automated in more mature markets. For Kumar, who had spent his formative years in the United States, the contrast pointed to an inefficiency that could be scaled with technology.
That observation shaped what would later become Upstox.
Kumar’s early exposure to markets began outside India. Growing up in a family that moved across France, Canada and the US, he and his brother Raghu Kumar started trading as teenagers, placing orders through payphones. “I was always attracted to investing and trading, and knew I wanted to do this professionally,” Kumar says.
By the late 1990s, while studying at the University of California, Irvine, he was drawn into the wider startup ecosystem during the dot-com boom. After graduating, he joined Thinkorswim in Chicago, where he saw how technology could equip retail investors with tools typically available only to institutions.
Parallelly, the brothers were building their own trading strategies. Starting with about $30,000, they used algorithmic models to trade derivatives, scaling their capital to nearly $3 million. “That was an incredible experience for a middle-income family in the US,” he says. They exited early during the 2008 financial crisis, preserving capital.
Later that year, Kumar, his brother and college friend Shrini Viswanath set up RKSV, initially focused on high-frequency trading. They secured direct market access and deployed automated arbitrage strategies at a time when competition was limited. Within a few years, the firm was handling 1-2% of exchange turnover.
The model, however, faced disruption around 2014 following the NSE co-location episode, which affected execution quality and led to losses. By then, RKSV had already begun building a retail brokerage business, launching it in 2012.
Early traction was limited. Opening a trading account was a manual process, prone to errors and rejections. A typical month saw about 500 accounts opened.
The inflection came with Aadhaar-based digital onboarding and the broader digital public infrastructure stack. “In the first month after Aadhaar, we opened 2,000 accounts, and within three months we opened 10,000 accounts,” Kumar says. The shift reduced friction in customer acquisition and expanded the addressable market.
Even so, raising capital was not immediate. A series of market scams had affected investor confidence in brokerage platforms. The company secured its first meaningful external funding around 2016, including backing from Ratan Tata. Kumar says this phase also sharpened the company’s focus on expanding access to wealth creation beyond active traders.
Growth accelerated again during the Covid-19 pandemic as retail participation in equities rose sharply. Lockdowns, higher savings and easier onboarding brought a new cohort of investors into the market. For Upstox, employee strength expanded from about 200 to 500 within a year, alongside a surge in account openings and trading volumes.
In the years since, the operating environment has become more complex. Regulatory tightening, particularly in derivatives trading, has altered activity patterns, while competition among discount brokerages has intensified. Platforms are increasingly targeting first-time investors with simplified interfaces and low-cost offerings.
Financially, the company has stabilised after the pandemic surge. In FY25, revenue from operations was largely flat at Rs 945 crore, while profit rose about 22% to Rs 215 crore. The firm employs just under 600 people.
Kumar argues the underlying market remains underpenetrated. “We are opening 300,000 accounts a month, and 60-70% are new-to-market customers,” he says. The company has also expanded beyond core broking, with products such as Upstox Pro for active traders and Upstox Invest for wealth management.
More than a decade after the Jabalpur visit, the structural gap Kumar observed has narrowed. Execution is largely automated, onboarding is digital, and access to markets has broadened. Yet, he maintains that the ecosystem is still in its early stages, with participation rates in equities well below those in developed markets.
The original arbitrage opportunity has, in effect, shifted – from price differences between exchanges to access gaps across investors.