Startup Deep Dive : Samco Securities — a paid broker surviving a free-trading price war

Samco Securities is one of the few Indian discount brokers left that still charges you to buy and hold a share. A flat ₹20, or 0.5 percent, whichever is lower, on every delivery trade, at a time when Zerodha, Groww and Upstox all do that same trade for free.

And yet the company Jimeet Modi rebuilt out of a forgotten Mumbai brokerage in 2015 now runs a mutual fund arm with roughly ₹2,570 crore in assets (IndMoney, as of 31 August 2026) that did not exist five years ago, and a broking business that, on its own numbers, turned over about ₹110 crore in FY25 (Tofler). This is the story of how a paid-for broker survived a price war it refused to fully join.

Quick facts

What they do

Samco Securities sells access to India’s stock, commodity and currency markets to retail investors and traders, through its StockNote trading app and web platform, for a flat per-order fee rather than a percentage of trade value beyond a cap. Alongside broking, the group runs Samco Asset Management, a SEBI-registered mutual fund house that manages its own equity, hybrid and debt schemes rather than merely distributing other funds. The two businesses share the Samco brand and a self-described focus on data-driven, momentum-style investing, but they sit in separate legal entities, Samco Securities Limited and Samco Asset Management Private Limited, and are regulated separately as a broker and as an AMC.

The origin

Jimeet Modi did not start Samco from a blank slate. He trained as a chartered accountant, ranked ninth in India in his CA final, and added a CFA charter on top, then interned at Deloitte and EY auditing large clients including Reliance Industries, Cadbury India and DSP Merrill Lynch, before joining his family’s Samruddhi Group as vice-president. That family connection mattered: Samruddhi Stock Brokers Limited, an NSE member since 1999 and a small, unremarkable full-service broker, was already sitting inside the group’s orbit when Modi decided to rebuild it rather than start fresh.

In March 2015 Modi incorporated Samco Ventures and used the existing Samruddhi entity as the licensed shell, rebranding it Samco Securities. The insight was not a new product; it was a bet on structure. India’s full-service brokers were charging a percentage of every trade, which meant a trader’s cost rose with the size of their portfolio regardless of how little work that extra size actually created for the broker. A flat fee per order, Modi’s team argued, better matched what a technology-led brokerage actually costs to run. Discount broking was not Modi’s invention, Zerodha had opened in 2010, but Samco layered a research and analytics pitch, later branded the Giga Trading Engine, on top of the flat-fee model, betting that price alone would not be enough to hold customers once bigger, better-funded rivals arrived.

The struggle years

Samco’s hardest years were not a single dramatic collapse; they were a slow financial squeeze visible in its own numbers. Two are documented.

• 2018 growth bet, uncertain payoff: Samco launched the StockNote app in April 2018 with a public target of one million downloads by March 2019, an AI-driven pitch meant to justify charging when rivals were racing to zero. No public disclosure confirms that download target was met (Business Standard, April 2018).
• FY24 profitability scare: Tofler’s data on Samco Securities Limited shows EBITDA falling roughly 178 percent year-on-year in FY24, a decline steep enough to imply the core broking business swung from an operating profit to an operating loss that year, before recovering to a reported 30 percent EBITDA CAGR into FY25 (Tofler, financial year ended 31 March 2024 and 31 March 2025).
• Structural price pressure since the early 2020s: Zerodha, Groww and Upstox all moved to zero-brokerage equity delivery trading, while Samco kept its flat ₹20 or 0.5 percent fee on the same trade, a gap that persists as of 2026 (broker fee comparisons, Chittorgarh and CompareShareBrokers, accessed September 2026).

None of this is a near-death event of the kind that makes headlines. It is the quieter, harder problem of running a paid product next to free ones, and it shows up plainly in a single year of collapsed EBITDA rather than in any public crisis.

The turning point

The moment that changed Samco’s shape was not a broking milestone at all. It was the decision to become a fund manager. Samco Asset Management launched its first new fund offer in January 2022, entering an industry crowded with incumbents who had decades of distribution reach that a discount broker’s app alone could not match.

The numbers on each side of that bet are stark. By June 2022, five months after launch, the AMC managed about ₹590 crore. By 31 August 2026, that figure had grown to roughly ₹2,570 crore across 13 schemes, nine of them equity funds (IndMoney, 31 August 2026), with Groww’s independent tracker putting the same period at a close ₹2,572.64 crore. In under four and a half years, Samco went from a pure broking shop with no asset-management revenue to running a fund business worth more than four times its FY25 broking revenue in assets under management, even though AUM and revenue are not the same thing and the AMC’s own profitability is not separately disclosed.

The money behind it

• Series A, FY2016: about ₹20 crore ($3 million), reported by Inc42, from backers not individually named in that disclosure.
• Series B, 30 April 2018: $7.5 million (about ₹49 crore), led by Bay Capital Investment Partners, a London-based investment firm, with participation from existing promoters (Inc42; Business Standard/PTI, 30 April 2018). This is the only externally led, named institutional round in Samco’s public funding history.
• Total raised: reported as $15.4 million by PitchBook and $19.6 million by Tracxn across four rounds; the two trackers disagree and neither publishes a post-money valuation for Samco.
• What each backer changed: the Series B round was earmarked, per the company at the time, for building out mutual fund distribution, lending capability, and research and advisory, the same three areas that later became the AMC and the analytics layer inside StockNote (Inc42, April 2018).
• No valuation has been made public at any round; Samco has not disclosed a “unicorn” style headline number, and none of the sources checked for this piece carry one.

How it makes money

• Brokerage per order: a flat ₹20 or 0.5 percent of trade value, whichever is lower, charged on both equity delivery and intraday trades, plus similar flat fees on commodity and currency derivatives (Samco’s published rate card, accessed September 2026).
• Depository and account charges: fees such as a per-ISIN debit charge on the demat side, comparable in structure to charges levied by rival discount brokers (broker fee comparison sites, 2026).
• Margin trading facility: interest income on funds Samco lends customers to take leveraged positions, a standard revenue line for Indian brokers though Samco does not publish a separate figure for it.
• Asset management fees: the AMC earns a management fee on its roughly ₹2,570 crore of mutual fund assets (IndMoney, 31 August 2026); SEBI caps these fees by scheme size but Samco’s own realised fee rate is not published.
• The part people get wrong: charging a flat fee does not automatically mean higher revenue per customer than a free-delivery competitor. Free-delivery brokers such as Zerodha, Groww and Upstox make their money instead on intraday and derivatives volumes, margin funding and float income, so Samco’s fee-on-everything model has to work harder to look competitive on any single trade even where it earns steadier income across smaller accounts.

The numbers

Samco Securities Limited is unlisted and does not publish a multi-year investor-facing profit and loss account, so only two recent years are independently verifiable from company-registry data aggregators. Figures are in ₹ crore.

• Return on equity for FY25: 1.42 percent (Tofler).
• Return on capital employed for FY25: 10.66 percent (Tofler).
• Debt to equity for FY25: 0.09, a lightly leveraged balance sheet for a broking business (Tofler).
• Headcount: about 391 employees as of 31 August 2025 (Tracxn), a small base against a five-lakh-plus claimed customer count.

These are thin margins for a business of this age. A 2.47 percent net margin and a 1.42 percent return on equity describe a broking arm that is profitable but not yet compounding capital quickly, which is one reason the AMC’s asset growth matters more to Samco’s story than its broking P&L alone.

Where the money comes from

• Broking versus asset management: Samco does not publish a revenue split between the two businesses, since they sit in separate legal entities (Samco Securities Limited and Samco Asset Management Private Limited) with separate regulatory filings; the ₹110 crore FY25 figure covers the broking entity only (Tofler).
• Customer base: the company states it is “trusted by 5.5 lakh-plus investors” on its own website (samco.in, accessed September 2026), a company-stated figure not independently audited in the sources checked here.
• Market position: Samco sits outside India’s top tier of discount brokers; Groww, Zerodha, Angel One and Upstox together held 63.3 percent of NSE active-client share in FY25 (Business Standard, April 2025), leaving Samco and other mid-sized brokers to split a smaller remainder.
• AMC scheme mix: of Samco Mutual Fund’s 13 live schemes, nine are equity funds, three hybrid and one debt (IndMoney, 2026), a portfolio skewed toward the higher-fee, higher-growth equity category rather than low-fee debt funds.
• The surprise: a broker built on a paid, flat-fee model now derives a meaningful share of its group’s future prospects from an asset-management business that earns recurring fees on assets under management rather than on trading activity at all, a steadier revenue logic than per-order brokerage.

The risks

• Price-war exposure: Samco’s flat-fee model sits directly against zero-brokerage delivery trading at Zerodha, Groww and Upstox, three rivals with far larger active-client bases; if Samco is forced to match free delivery trading, its already thin FY25 net margin of 2.47 percent gives it little room to absorb the revenue loss (Tofler; broker rate comparisons, 2026).
• Regulatory and technology risk: SEBI has tightened penalties on exchanges and, by extension, the trading infrastructure brokers depend on, for business disruptions and technical glitches, with fines running into crores of rupees for major exchanges over recent incidents (Business Standard reporting on SEBI’s penalty framework and a ₹6.04 crore fine on NSE, 2024-25); a broker-side outage carries similar reputational and regulatory exposure even without a documented Samco-specific incident found in this research.
• Thin capital base for AMC scale-up: Samco Asset Management is competing for assets against fund houses with decades of distribution and far larger balance sheets, while Samco Group’s total disclosed external funding of $15.4-19.6 million (PitchBook; Tracxn) is small next to the capital raised by venture-backed rivals such as Groww and Upstox, which could limit how fast the AMC can keep growing its roughly ₹2,570 crore asset base (IndMoney, August 2026).

The takeaway

Samco’s lesson is not that flat fees beat free ones, or the other way round. It is that refusing to compete on the one metric everyone else has raced to zero, transaction price, only works if you build a second, less commoditised business before the first one gets squeezed flat. Samco’s broking margins tell that squeeze plainly: a 2.47 percent net margin and a year, FY24, when EBITDA nearly halved. The asset-management arm it built alongside that squeeze, now managing more in assets than the broking business turns over in a year, is the part of the bet that has room left to compound. The specific tactic, becoming a fund manager, will not transfer to every business under price pressure. The underlying discipline, building a second revenue engine on a different logic before the first one runs out of margin, generally does.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Samco Securities and when?

Jimeet Modi founded Samco Securities in March 2015, building it on Samruddhi Stock Brokers Limited, an existing NSE-member brokerage that had been part of his family’s business group. Pratik Adani joined as co-founder and chief technology officer that November.

Is Samco Securities listed on a stock exchange?

No. Samco Securities Limited is a private, unlisted company as of September 2026, and no public IPO filing for the company was found during this research.

How does Samco make money if it charges brokerage on every trade?

It earns a flat ₹20 or 0.5 percent fee, whichever is lower, on delivery and intraday equity trades, along with depository charges, margin trading interest, and, through its separate asset management arm, management fees on mutual fund assets it runs itself.

What is Samco Mutual Fund and how big is it?

Samco Mutual Fund, run by Samco Asset Management Private Limited, launched its first scheme in January 2022 and managed about ₹2,570 crore across 13 schemes as of 31 August 2026, according to IndMoney, up from roughly ₹590 crore in June 2022.

How does Samco compare with Zerodha and Groww on cost?

Samco charges for equity delivery trades that Zerodha, Groww and Upstox all offer for free, making it more expensive on that specific transaction even as it competes on research tools and its own asset management products.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “SAMCO Raises $7.5 Mn In Series B Funding Led By Bay Capital,” April 2018
• Business Standard / PTI, “Samco Ventures raises Rs 49 crore in Series B round,” April 2018
• Business Standard / PTI, “SAMCO Securities launches StockNote app,” April 2018
• Tofler, Samco Securities Limited company financials page, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, Samco Securities Limited legal entity profile, accessed September 2026
• PitchBook, Samco Securities company profile, accessed September 2026
• IndMoney, Samco Mutual Fund AMC page, accessed September 2026
• Groww, Samco Mutual Fund AMC page, accessed September 2026
• samco.in, “About Us” page, accessed September 2026
• LinkedIn / The Org, Pratik Adani profile, accessed September 2026
• werisebyliftingothers.in, biography of Jimeet Modi, August 2024
• Business Standard, “NSE active clients see 21% rise in FY25, Groww cements lead with 36% growth,” April 2025
• Business Standard, reporting on SEBI’s technical-glitch penalty framework and NSE fine, 2024-25
• Chittorgarh and CompareShareBrokers, Samco brokerage rate comparison pages, accessed September 2026

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