Startup Deep Dive : Fyers — the discount broker that never took a rupee of VC money

Three orphaned brothers in Bengaluru built a stockbroker to ₹297 crore in FY24 revenue and ₹70.7 crore in profit without taking a single rupee of venture capital (CRISIL Ratings rationale, September 2025). Every discount-broking rival that grew faster than Fyers did it by burning investor cash on customer acquisition; Fyers refused every term sheet for a decade and still out-earned most of them per active client.

The company is FYERS, founded in 2015 by Tejas, Yashas and Shreyas Khoday, and it is a useful test case for a question every founder eventually asks: does staying small and profitable beat growing fast and subsidised. Fyers picked profitable, and it is now trying to prove that discipline scales into asset management just as the regulatory floor under discount broking is shifting under everyone’s feet.

Quick facts

What they do

Fyers is a technology-first discount stockbroker that lets retail and high-frequency traders buy and sell equities, futures and options, currency derivatives and commodities on the NSE, BSE and MCX through its own trading terminal and mobile app, built around TradingView-style charting rather than the bare order tickets most Indian brokers shipped in the 2010s. Its customers skew toward active, chart-driven traders rather than first-time investors: the company says it has served more than one million traders since inception, but only a fraction trade every month, and that fraction produces almost all of its brokerage revenue (fyers.in/about, accessed September 2026).

The origin

Tejas Khoday was nine when his father’s real-estate business collapsed under debt during the post-Asian-crisis slowdown, and he and his two brothers were raised largely by their grandparents and an aunt. He taught himself markets off old Dalal Street magazines and TV tickers, then spent the early 2010s failing to get institutional broking jobs before landing at Zerodha for about a year in a support role, and then at Futures First, GHF Group’s proprietary trading arm, trading energy and commodity spreads. The insight that became Fyers was simple and specific: Indian brokers did not understand technology, and the technology vendors who built charting and data tools did not understand broking, so nobody was building for the trader who wanted both in one product. Tejas applied for an NSE broking licence in 2014 at age 25, got in-principle approval in 2015, and incorporated Fyers with his brothers before trading began from a 200-square-foot office once the licence came through in 2016 (an account of the founders’ history published on tal64.com; YourStory, December 2016).

The struggle years

The early years were less a single crisis than a long grind against two things: capital and credibility. Fyers had no marketing budget and grew by word of mouth inside trading forums, which meant it took until the end of 2017 to cross 5,000 customers, a milestone the founders treated as proof of concept rather than success. Between 2016 and 2018, Tejas pitched the company to venture capitalists and banks and turned every one of them down: investors wanted Fyers to become a financial products marketplace selling insurance and mutual funds, to cut brokerage to zero to chase market share the way well-funded rivals were doing, or to license its technology to other brokers instead of running its own brand. Multiple acquisition approaches from banks and large NBFCs were also rejected. By around 2018, Tejas stopped taking pitch meetings altogether, a decision that meant slower headline growth than venture-backed competitors for the next several years (tal64.com founder account, accessed September 2026). On the regulatory side, the company has since drawn at least two SEBI adjudication orders: a March 2024 order and a February 2025 order for lapses in business-continuity planning, including inadequate quarterly peak-load monitoring and a missed disaster-recovery drill, that carried a ₹4 lakh penalty (SEBI adjudication order, February 2025; Moneylife, February 2025).

The turning point

The inflection was not a funding round or a product launch; it was the COVID-19 lockdown. Fyers went into 2020 with an estimated 50,000 active traders after four slow years of organic growth. The lockdown forced the entire industry to digitise account opening overnight, and Fyers had already built end-to-end digital KYC, compressing onboarding from days to roughly 40 seconds. That let its existing, loyal base of long-time users refer friends and family into the platform just as retail trading volumes surged nationwide, and larger, thinly-provisioned platforms suffered repeated outages during the 2020-21 volatility, pushing serious traders toward Fyers for reliability. The company says it grew roughly tenfold through word of mouth alone in this period, with no paid acquisition spend, ending 2022 with more than 100,000 active traders against roughly 50,000 at the start of 2020 (tal64.com founder account, accessed September 2026). Because it paid nothing for that growth, the surge converted almost directly into profit rather than being absorbed by customer-acquisition cost, which is the single biggest reason its FY22-FY24 profit grew faster than its revenue.

The money behind it

Fyers has never raised institutional funding. Tracxn and Crunchbase both record zero funding rounds and no disclosed valuation as of September 2026, and the company has been self-funded by the three founders since 2015.

• Capital source: founder equity only; no venture capital, private equity or bank debt disclosed (Tracxn, accessed September 2026).
• What “backers” changed: none — the absence of outside investors is itself the strategic choice the founders describe as central to the business, prioritising survival and margin over subsidised growth (Business Today, November 2025).
• Total raised: ₹0 in external equity funding (Tracxn; Crunchbase, accessed September 2026).
• Latest valuation: not applicable — no priced funding event exists to derive one from.
• Balance sheet stance: the company describes itself as debt-free through FY25 (Business Today, November 2025).

How it makes money

Fyers earns money the way most Indian discount brokers do, just at a smaller scale, and the mix matters because it determines how exposed the business is to trading-volume swings and rate regulation.

• Flat brokerage: a fixed fee of up to ₹20 per executed order across equity delivery, intraday, F&O, currency and commodity trades, unchanged since launch in 2016 (fyers.in charges list, accessed September 2026).
• Interest on client float: interest earned on unutilised client funds held with the broker, a standard and often underappreciated revenue line for every discount broker, though Fyers does not disclose its exact share.
• Margin trading facility (MTF): interest income from lending clients up to four times their capital against pledged holdings for delivery trades; Fyers moved to a slab-rate structure from 2 June 2025, charging lower rates for larger borrowed amounts (Fyers MTF product page and support portal, accessed September 2026).
• Statutory and ancillary charges: DP (depository participant) fees, clearing charges, and pass-through statutory levies such as STT, stamp duty, GST and SEBI turnover fees.
• Emerging fee income: portfolio management fees from FYERS Asset Management, launched after Fyers obtained a PMS licence in 2023, and, pending regulatory approval, management fees from a proposed Category III AIF (Business Today, September 2023; Deccan Herald, 2026).

The part people get wrong: flat per-order brokerage looks like the whole story, but for most Indian discount brokers — Fyers included — interest income on client funds and margin lending is a large and structurally different revenue stream from trading commissions, because it does not depend on how often a client trades, only on how much idle or pledged capital sits with the broker.

The numbers

Figures below are for Fyers Securities Private Limited, the licensed broking entity, drawn from its financial filings as reported by CRISIL Ratings and business media. Unit: ₹ crore.

• FY22 revenue ₹57.78 crore, net profit ₹22.52 crore (YourStory, March 2023, citing regulatory filings).
• FY23 revenue ₹204 crore, net profit ₹43.3 crore, roughly 3.5x revenue growth YoY (CRISIL Ratings rationale, September 2025).
• FY24 revenue ₹297 crore, up about 45.6% YoY; net profit ₹70.7 crore, up about 62.9% YoY (CRISIL Ratings rationale, September 2025).
• FY21 net profit was ₹2.6 crore, the base against which the FY24 jump is measured (Business Today, November 2025).
• FY25 revenue held at roughly ₹300 crore, essentially flat, which the company attributes to fewer new client additions amid the broader F&O slowdown, while remaining profitable and debt-free (Business Today, November 2025).

Where the money comes from

Fyers does not publish a segment-wise revenue split, but the client base and product mix show where the business is concentrated, and the surprise is how top-heavy it is.

• Client concentration: of more than one million cumulative customers, roughly 225,811 were active NSE clients as of June 2025 (Investorgain/NSE data) — a small fraction of the total base is understood to generate the large majority of trading revenue, consistent with the company’s own framing of itself as built for “serious traders” rather than first-time investors (fyers.in/about; tal64.com founder account).
• Segment mix: derivatives (futures and options) trading is the dominant revenue driver industry-wide for discount brokers — up to roughly 80% of revenue at some discount brokerages, against under a third for full-service brokers (ThePrint, 2025, citing brokerage disclosures) — and Fyers’ flat per-order pricing model makes it structurally similar in this respect, though the company does not disclose its own exact derivatives share.
• Scale versus peers: Groww had about 1.3 crore active NSE clients and Zerodha about 68.5 lakh as of end-May 2026 (Business Today, April 2026, citing NSE data) — both roughly 30 to 60 times Fyers’ active base, underlining that Fyers competes on product depth and per-client revenue rather than raw client count.
• New lines, still small: PMS assets under FYERS Asset Management stood at roughly ₹17.67 crore across 12 clients as of June 2026 (ipoplatform.com PMS data), a negligible share of group revenue today but the stated growth vector for the next five years.

The risks

• Regulatory tightening on F&O, the industry’s main profit engine. SEBI’s derivatives reforms — upfront collection of options premiums from 1 February 2025, higher minimum contract sizes, and new individual position limits on single-stock derivatives from 1 October 2025 — have already cut small-investor derivatives participation by an estimated 49% in some segments (Business Standard, citing ICRA, May 2025). CRISIL has separately flagged discount brokers as the segment most exposed to these curbs (Business Standard, citing CRISIL, October 2024), and Fyers’ flat-fee, high-frequency-trader model sits squarely in that exposure.
• Compliance and business-continuity gaps under supervision. Two SEBI adjudication orders (March 2024 and February 2025) found lapses in Fyers’ disaster-recovery drills and board-level review of business-continuity planning, resulting in a ₹4 lakh penalty; repeated findings of this kind invite closer supervisory scrutiny even when individual penalties are small (SEBI adjudication order, February 2025).
• Client-fund handling under a tightening RBI-SEBI framework. Since 1 January 2024, SEBI’s Trading Supported by Blocked Amount framework, built on an RBI-approved UPI single-block-multiple-debit mechanism, blocks client funds at the bank rather than letting brokers hold them upfront, reducing the float brokers can earn interest on and adding operational complexity for firms like Fyers that rely partly on that float for revenue (Business Standard, 2023-24 coverage of SEBI’s ASBA-like facility).
• Concentration in a thin, cyclical client base. With roughly 225,000 active clients driving most revenue against a broader retail-trading slowdown since the 2024-25 F&O curbs, Fyers has less room than mass-market rivals to absorb a prolonged dip in trading activity, since it has neither a large low-engagement user base to fall back on nor external capital to bridge a weak year.

The takeaway

Fyers’ lesson is not that bootstrapping beats venture funding in general; plenty of self-funded startups stay small and disappear. It is that refusing capital forces a specific kind of discipline: every feature, every hire and every marketing rupee has to be justified against cash already earned, not cash raised, and that discipline compounds quietly for years before a market shock — in this case, COVID-19’s forced digitisation of retail trading — turns patient, product-led growth into a sudden and non-dilutive windfall. The same discipline that built the broking business is now the constraint on how fast Fyers can grow its asset-management arm, since PMS and AIF businesses typically need scale and distribution reach that a decade of organic-only growth has not yet produced.

Frequently asked questions

Is Fyers a listed company?

No. Fyers Securities Private Limited is privately held and founder-owned, with no IPO announced as of September 2026.

Has Fyers raised any external funding?

No. Tracxn and Crunchbase both list zero funding rounds for Fyers as of September 2026; the company has been funded entirely by its three founders since 2015.

How does Fyers make money if its brokerage is only ₹20 per order?

Beyond flat per-order brokerage, Fyers earns interest on client funds held with it, interest income from its margin trading facility, statutory and depository charges passed through to clients, and, more recently, portfolio management fees from FYERS Asset Management.

Who regulates Fyers?

Fyers is registered with SEBI as a stock broker (registration INZ000008524) and depository participant, and holds exchange memberships with NSE, BSE, MCX, CDSL and NSDL; client fund movements also fall under an RBI-approved UPI blocking mechanism used in SEBI’s client-fund-protection framework.

How big is Fyers compared with Zerodha or Groww?

Much smaller by client count. Fyers had about 225,811 active NSE clients in June 2025, versus Groww’s roughly 1.3 crore and Zerodha’s roughly 68.5 lakh active clients as of end-May 2026 (Business Today, April 2026, citing NSE data).

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• CRISIL Ratings, rating rationale for FYERS Securities Private Limited, September 2025
• YourStory, “FYERS looks to cut in competitive discount broking space,” March 2023
• Business Today, “How to build a profitable startup? FYERS’ Tejas Khoday shares his mantra,” November 2025
• YourStory, “Rising out of a personal tragedy, 3 brothers create FYERS to become youngest stockbrokers,” December 2016
• tal64.com (Priyadarshan Banjan), “The Fyers Story,” founder-account narrative, accessed September 2026
• SEBI, adjudication order in the matter of Fyers Securities Private Limited, February 2025
• SEBI, adjudication order in the matter of Fyers Securities Pvt. Ltd., March 2024
• Moneylife, “Fyers Securities Penalised Rs4 Lakh for Non-compliance with Disaster Recovery Mechanism,” February 2025
• fyers.in/about and fyers.in/charges-list, company disclosures, accessed September 2026
• FYERS support portal, Margin Trading Facility documentation, accessed September 2026 (slab rates effective 2 June 2025)
• Business Today, “Fyers eyes PMS debut with more transparency, low fees,” September 2023
• Deccan Herald, “FYERS to launch Category III AIF in Q2; aims to raise Rs 1,000 crore,” 2026
• ipoplatform.com, Fyers Asset Management PMS AUM data, accessed September 2026 (data as of June 2026)
• Investorgain, Fyers active customers data (NSE), accessed September 2026 (data as of June 2025)
• Business Today, “Zerodha, Groww, Angel One, Upstox: How active clients changed in past 8 years,” April 2026
• Business Standard, citing ICRA, on decline in small-investor derivatives participation, May 2025
• Business Standard, citing CRISIL, on discount brokers’ exposure to F&O regulation, October 2024
• ThePrint, “Even as SEBI lays down new curbs on F&O market, discount brokerages are changing business models,” 2025
• Business Standard, coverage of SEBI’s Trading Supported by Blocked Amount / UPI block facility, 2023-2024
• Tracxn and Crunchbase, company and funding profiles for Fyers, accessed September 2026

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