Groww's valuation blasts past $12B, CEO Lalit Keshre enters billionaire club
Groww CEO Lalit Keshre grew up in a small Madhya Pradesh town. He cracked the JEE and studied at IIT Bombay before launching an edtech startup and later joining Flipkart.
Retail investing platform Groww is one of the hottest stocks on the Indian bourses. Groww's shares ripped another 17.76% on Thursday to close at Rs 174.77 apiece, extending the momentum that began with its blockbuster debut.
The rally has now pushed the company’s valuation to Rs 1,07,895.95 crore (about $12 billion), turning Groww into one of India’s most valuable listed fintechs practically overnight.
In just a few sessions, it has already leapfrogged Paytm parent, One97 Communications, whose market cap now sits at Rs 85,228.21 crore, reshuffling the pecking order in India’s consumer fintech landscape.
The rally has also minted a new billionaire. Lalit Keshre, Co-founder and CEO of Groww—who holds 55.91 crore shares or 9.06% of the company—now sits on a stake worth roughly Rs 9,448 crore, placing him comfortably around the $1.1 billion mark at current prices.
Keshre was raised in Lepa, a small village in Madhya Pradesh, where his father worked as a farmer. With no English-medium school in the area, he moved to Khargone to continue his education, later cracking the JEE and earning dual degrees in micro-electronics from IIT Bombay.
Before founding Groww in 2016 with three colleagues from Flipkart, Keshre ran an edtech startup and went on to become one of Flipkart’s early product managers.
The latest spike in Groww's share prices builds on last Thursday’s early-session burst of optimism, when the fintech company's shares briefly pushed past Rs 150, nudging it over the $10 billion mark for the first time.
That momentum had started a day earlier with its blockbuster listing, where the stock closed more than 30% above the Rs 100 issue price.
Groww’s IPO, subscribed 17.6 times, showed that institutional investors weren’t just casually interested; they were lining up for exposure to one of the few profitable, at-scale consumer fintechs in India.
The Rs 6,632 crore raise gives the company fresh firepower just as India’s retail investing market continues to deepen, even if monthly participation growth has cooled recently.
Edited by Suman Singh