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

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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

Company FYERS (Fyers Securities Private Limited)
Founded 2015 (NSE trading membership from 2016), Bengaluru
Founder(s) Tejas Khoday (CEO), Yashas Khoday (Chief Product Officer), Shreyas Khoday
Businesses Discount stockbroking (equity, F&O, currency, commodity), margin trading facility, portfolio management services (FYERS Asset Management), Category III AIF (in progress), GIFT-IFSC access
Latest FY revenue ₹297 crore, FY24 (year to 31 March 2024); ~₹300 crore reported for FY25, broadly flat (CRISIL Ratings rationale, Sept 2025; Business Today, Nov 2025)
Latest FY profit/loss Net profit ₹70.7 crore, FY24 (CRISIL Ratings rationale, Sept 2025)
Listed Private — no IPO announced as of September 2026
Market value / last valuation Not applicable — bootstrapped, no external funding round or disclosed valuation (Tracxn, Crunchbase, accessed September 2026)
Key shareholders / CEO Tejas Khoday (CEO); founder-family owned, no institutional investors on the cap table as of September 2026

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.

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.

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.

Fiscal year Revenue / total income Net profit
FY22 (year to Mar 2022) 57.78 22.52
FY23 (year to Mar 2023) 204 43.3
FY24 (year to Mar 2024) 297 70.7
FY25 (year to Mar 2025) ~300 (reported, broadly flat YoY) Not disclosed publicly as of Sept 2026

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.

The risks

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).

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