Startup Deep Dive : Finvasia — it made trading free and still grew revenue 35% in FY24

Finvasia Securities Private Limited, the Mohali-based broking arm behind the zero-commission trading app Shoonya, booked ₹58.7 crore (~$6.1 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026) in revenue for the year ended 31 March 2024, up roughly 35% on the year before, according to two separate corporate data aggregators, Tracxn and EMIS. That is a real and growing number for a company that charges its retail traders nothing at all to trade.

The contradiction is the whole story. Shoonya advertises zero brokerage, zero clearing charges, zero technology fees and zero account-maintenance charges — and yet the entity behind it has been profitable enough to keep growing for over a decade, while its founders, two brothers from Chandigarh, have quietly built more than a dozen other businesses around it, from a forex platform to a diabetes-reversal clinic. This piece traces how a proprietary trading outfit that started in Canada in 2009 became an Indian discount broker, an NBFC, a social-trading network and a healthcare company, using only numbers that could be traced back to a filing, a data aggregator or a named executive on the record.

Quick facts

What they do

Finvasia is the umbrella for a group of financial and non-financial businesses run out of Mohali, Punjab, but its best-known Indian product is Shoonya, a broking app that lets retail investors trade equities, derivatives, currencies and commodities on the NSE, BSE, MCX and NCDEX without paying brokerage, clearing charges, technology fees, account-maintenance charges or a minimum balance, according to the company’s own platform description and independent broker-review coverage. Around Shoonya sit a cluster of other units: a foreign-exchange and CFD trading business built on the ACTTrader and Fxview technology stack aimed at international traders; ZuluTrade, a social/copy-trading network Finvasia acquired in 2021 that lets users mirror other traders’ positions across more than 150 countries; a neo-banking app called Jumpp built in partnership with YES Bank; a payments business called CapitalWallet; and a real-estate arm, Finvasia Estates. The group also runs unrelated healthcare ventures — Gini Health (a genomics-based diabetes-reversal facility), Ethniq (natural-ingredient pharmaceuticals) and Bodyloop (in-body health-monitoring microsensors) — all under the same corporate roof, per Investing.com Studios’ company profile.

The origin

The founding insight did not come from India. Brothers Sarvjeet Singh Virk and Tajinder Singh Virk, both Punjab Engineering College graduates, had worked on the other side of institutional finance before starting Finvasia — Sarvjeet as vice president at Spectrum Novel Solutions and Tajinder as a vice president and trading strategist at Venus Capital Management in Boston, per their LinkedIn profiles. Finvasia itself began in Canada in 2009 as a proprietary trading and technology outfit, then registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India as a Foreign Institutional Investor and moved into India in 2011, incorporating Finvasia Securities Private Limited that February. Watching the Indian retail market from the FII seat, the founders concluded that ordinary Indian traders were paying disproportionately high brokerage on every single trade, a fee structure the brothers had not had to deal with as institutional players. That observation — that the cost of trading, not the difficulty of it, was the real barrier for retail India — became the reason the group later built a zero-commission product instead of another fee-charging brokerage.

The struggle years

Turning that insight into a business took years, not a pivot memo. Finvasia spent 2011 to 2013 as a pure FII trading entity before it received the regulatory approvals from the NSE and MCX in 2013 that let it open a retail broking business at all, according to a Finvasia milestones summary corroborated by the company’s own exchange memberships; it did not become a BSE and AMFI trading member until 2015, and it took until 2018 to add NCDEX membership and unify trading across all four exchanges under one account. Only in 2016 did the zero-commission Shoonya product itself appear, meaning the company operated for roughly seven years as an FII-and-technology business before its now-flagship consumer product existed in any form.

The struggle did not end once Shoonya launched. In April 2023, Shoonya suffered a technical platform issue serious enough that Finvasia compensated affected traders to the tune of ₹3 crore, according to a StartupTalky account of Sarvjeet Virk’s account of the company’s 2023. For a zero-commission broker whose entire pitch rests on reliability rather than price, an outage that has to be settled in crore-denominated compensation is a direct hit on the one thing the business is supposed to sell: trust that the platform will simply work when a trade needs to be placed.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point on the record is Shoonya’s break from its parent brand. For years the zero-commission platform lived as a product line under the Finvasia.com website; on 9 December 2022, the Finvasia Group formally migrated the business to its own domain, shoonya.com, and released an all-new Shoonya app with its own identity, according to ANINews’ coverage of the launch. The numbers on either side of that break are stark. Sarvjeet Virk told Inc42 that Shoonya had a little over 1.1 lakh clients in 2022; by 31 December 2023, that had grown to more than 1.9 lakh, a 72.92% year-on-year jump, and by 31 January 2024 the platform had crossed 2.2 lakh clients. Giving the zero-brokerage business its own app, its own domain and its own marketing identity — rather than leaving it as a feature of the older institutional-sounding Finvasia brand — appears to be the single decision that turned Shoonya from a slow-growing side product into the group’s fastest-growing consumer line.

The money behind it

Finvasia’s capital history is unusually murky for a company of its scale, and the public trackers do not agree with each other.

• Tracxn’s funding data lists Finvasia’s total disclosed funding at just $1.53 million across two rounds from four investors, with Mauritius-based Intrinsic Investments among the backers and the most recent round, of an undisclosed amount, dated 3 October 2022.
• A separate milestones account, corroborated by Bharatpedia’s Finvasia entry, states that Finvasia received an FDI infusion of ₹150 crore from Mauritius-based Intrinsic Investment Limited in 2016 — a figure roughly two orders of magnitude larger than Tracxn’s total and not confirmed by any RoC filing seen this session.
• Neither figure squares easily with Finvasia Securities Private Limited’s own paid-up capital of just ₹2.21–2.26 crore as recorded in its most recent RoC filings (per Tofler and MyCorporateInfo), which suggests any larger infusion, if real, would have landed in a different group entity rather than the broking company that runs Shoonya.
• Finvasia has never announced a headline institutional funding round the way most of its fintech peers do; its leadership talks instead about organic, revenue-funded expansion into new verticals.

Given the conflict, the safest statement is this: Finvasia reports no confirmed, sizeable external funding round and no disclosed valuation, and its growth into forex, social trading, neo-banking, payments, real estate and healthcare appears to have been funded largely from the group’s own trading and broking revenue rather than from venture capital.

How it makes money

Shoonya’s pitch is that the classic broking revenue line — commission per trade — is zero. Sarvjeet Virk, describing the model to Inc42, laid out where the money comes from instead:

• Interest earned on client cash and margin balances held in demat and trading accounts between trade settlements — the float, which is the core revenue engine of most “free” brokers globally.
• A premium membership priced at ₹799 per month (plus GST) that unlocks an AI-powered prediction and signal tool built with partner I Know First, covering roughly 1,500 Indian stocks.
• Subscription fees for advanced charting tools and research reports sold on top of the free base platform.
• Depository-participant fees and pledge charges levied on retail investors for share-pledging and custody services, which sit outside the “zero brokerage” promise because they are regulatory/service charges, not trading commissions.
• B2B technology and consulting fees earned by licensing Shoonya’s trading infrastructure and support to foreign portfolio investors, a legacy of Finvasia’s original FII-facing business.

The part most users get wrong is assuming “zero brokerage” means the company earns nothing from them individually — in practice, every rupee sitting idle in a Shoonya trading account, and every subscriber paying ₹799 a month for the AI tool, is doing the commission’s old job.

The numbers

Finvasia Securities Private Limited does not publish investor-style annual results, so the figures below are reconstructed from the year-on-year growth rates disclosed by two independent aggregators — Tracxn and EMIS both put FY24 revenue growth at roughly 35% over FY23, which lets the FY23 base be estimated with reasonable confidence; the FY22 figure relies on a single aggregator (TheCompanyCheck) and is marked accordingly. No aggregator disclosed a reliable absolute profit-after-tax figure for any year, so that row is left blank rather than filled with a guess.

The direction of travel is unambiguous even where the exact rupee figures are not: Finvasia Securities’ top line has been growing at double- and triple-digit rates for at least three consecutive years, even as the company charges its core retail customers nothing to trade.

Where the money comes from

The group’s own claims put its addressable footprint at more than 5 million clients across 190-plus countries, a figure repeated in both a YourStory profile of the founders and Investing.com Studios’ company overview — but that headline number is misleading if read as a description of Shoonya’s Indian retail broking business.

• Indian retail broking (Shoonya): around 2.2 lakh clients as of 31 January 2024, per Sarvjeet Virk’s figures reported by Inc42 — the smallest client base of any Finvasia business line by headcount, despite being the most visible in India.
• Global social/copy trading (ZuluTrade): acquired by Finvasia in 2021; the platform has facilitated more than $2 trillion in cumulative trade volume across 150-plus countries since it was founded in 2007, per Investing.com Studios.
• Forex and CFD trading technology (Fxview, ACTTrader): institutional-grade trading infrastructure serving professional and high-frequency traders, with Finvasia maintaining brokerage and investment-banking presence in Mauritius, the UAE, South Africa and the EU.
• Neo-banking (Jumpp): an AI-powered banking, savings, payments, investing and lending app built with YES Bank, targeted at the Indian market.
• Non-financial verticals (Gini Health, Ethniq, Bodyloop, Finvasia Estates): healthcare and real-estate businesses that generate no meaningful trading-related revenue at all but sit inside the same group structure.

The surprise is the mismatch between brand recognition and client count: the product most Indians associate with Finvasia — the zero-brokerage Shoonya app — has by far the smallest user base of any of the group’s global platforms, while the bulk of its stated 5-million-plus client claim rides on forex and social-trading businesses that operate almost entirely outside India and that most Indian retail investors have never heard of.

The risks

• Float-dependent revenue in a low-rate or low-activity environment: with brokerage, clearing and technology fees all set to zero, Shoonya’s core India revenue leans on interest earned on client cash balances and on ancillary subscriptions such as the ₹799-a-month AI tool. A sustained fall in interest rates, or a market downturn that shrinks idle client balances and trading volumes, removes the platform’s main revenue lever without an obvious substitute.
• Operational/platform risk in a zero-cost model: the April 2023 technical issue that cost the company ₹3 crore in trader compensation, per StartupTalky’s account, shows how a reliability failure translates directly into cash outflow and reputational damage for a broker whose only differentiator against larger, better-funded rivals is that the platform is supposed to simply work at zero cost.
• Conglomerate spread against a small capital base: Finvasia Securities Private Limited’s own paid-up capital is only ₹2.21–2.26 crore, even as the wider group runs regulator-heavy, capital-intensive businesses in broking, NBFC lending, depository services, forex/CFD trading, neo-banking and healthcare simultaneously. Running that many regulated verticals off a comparatively small disclosed capital base in the flagship broking entity is a structural execution risk that would concern any lender or regulator scrutinising the group closely.

The takeaway

The Finvasia story is really about what a company does with the years nobody is watching. It spent roughly seven years as an obscure proprietary trading and FII outfit before it ever launched the zero-commission product it is now known for, and it spent further years building fringe exchange memberships one at a time — NSE and MCX in 2013, BSE and AMFI in 2015, NCDEX in 2018 — before those pieces added up to a single unified trading account. The lesson that transfers beyond fintech is that giving away the obvious revenue line, brokerage in this case, is only viable if there is a less obvious one already built to replace it; Finvasia had spent a decade on the institutional side of the market learning exactly where the float, the subscriptions and the B2B technology fees could sit before it made trading itself free for retail customers.

Frequently asked questions

Is Finvasia and Shoonya the same company?

Shoonya is a trading platform brand owned and operated by Finvasia Securities Private Limited, the SEBI-registered broking arm of the wider Finvasia Group; the group also owns separate businesses in forex trading, social trading, neo-banking, payments, real estate and healthcare.

Who founded Finvasia and when?

Brothers Sarvjeet Singh Virk and Tajinder Singh Virk founded Finvasia in Canada in 2009 before moving into India as Foreign Institutional Investors and incorporating Finvasia Securities Private Limited in Mohali/Chandigarh on 1 February 2011.

How does Shoonya make money if it charges zero brokerage?

Per Sarvjeet Virk’s account to Inc42, Shoonya earns from interest on client cash balances, a ₹799-per-month premium AI subscription, charting and research subscriptions, depository-participant and pledge charges, and B2B technology fees from foreign portfolio investors — none of which count as trading commission.

How much funding has Finvasia raised?

Public trackers disagree: Tracxn lists total disclosed funding of only $1.53 million, while a separate milestones account cites a ₹150 crore FDI infusion from Mauritius-based Intrinsic Investment Limited in 2016. Neither figure is confirmed by an RoC filing or a company announcement, and Finvasia has not announced a headline institutional round.

Is Finvasia profitable?

Its broking entity, Finvasia Securities Private Limited, reported ₹58.7 crore revenue for FY24, growing at roughly 35% year-on-year per Tracxn and EMIS, but data aggregators report conflicting profit trends for the same period with no consistent absolute profit figure available in the filings summaries reviewed.

Sources

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

• Tracxn, Finvasia Securities Private Limited legal-entity profile and Finvasia funding/investors data, accessed September 2026
• Tofler, Finvasia Securities Private Limited company financials and director records, accessed September 2026
• EMIS, Finvasia Securities Private Limited company profile, accessed September 2026
• TheCompanyCheck.com, Finvasia Securities Private Limited FY2026 profile, accessed September 2026
• MyCorporateInfo.com, Finvasia Securities Private Limited company details, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “How Shoonya Is Leveraging AI & Zero Brokerage Model To Change Investing & Trading Dynamics In India,” accessed September 2026
• StartupTalky, “Sarvjeet Virk: Finvasia’s Journey and Shoonya’s Innovation,” fintech industry recap, accessed September 2026
• YourStory, Finvasia company profile, accessed September 2026
• Investing.com Studios, “Finvasia: Innovating Across Finance, Healthcare, and Beyond,” accessed September 2026
• Bharatpedia, “Finvasia” entry, accessed September 2026
• ANINews, “The Finvasia Group launches the All-New Shoonya,” 9 December 2022
• Revelio Labs, Finvasia Financial Svcs employee-count estimate, accessed September 2026
• Shoonya.com, “About Us,” accessed September 2026
• LinkedIn, Sarvjeet Singh Virk profile (founder background), accessed September 2026

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