How Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath went from school dropout to stock market billionaire – the chess prodigy who launched India’s wildly successful brokerage platform

Feb 26 , 2021

India’s youngest billionaire Nikhil Kamath, who gave up on education and tried chess as a career, before making millions out of setting up a share trading platform. Photo: @Designerlymag/Twitter

Well before Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, Kamath was hooked on chess, but couldn’t realise his dream of becoming a professional player

His fast-growing trading platform has seen him and brother Nithin together valued at US$1.5 billion, hailed as India’s ‘richest self-made billionaires under 40’

The world economy endured roller coaster ups and downs in 2020. While we witnessed the worst economic crash in a generation, global stock markets were able to rise and recover later in the year, thanks to unprecedented stimulus and vaccine breakthroughs.

The upheaval has been a boon for retail investors and the trading platforms they rely on. Among them is the Indian brokerage platform Zerodha, which, despite the pandemic squeezing savings accounts, doubled its number of registered users to four million.

This growth has been a big win for Zerodha’s co-founder and chief investment officer, Nikhil Kamath. He and his brother, Nithin, now have a combined net worth of US$1.5 billion, according to Forbes. Here’s his story.

He dropped out of school to play chess

Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit may have hyped up chess in 2022, but well before it came into vogue, Nikhil was a pro. With a penchant for the sport, which he says “teaches you how to work under a structure, in a system, but yet try and be creative within that system”, he dropped out of school at 14 to pursue it as a career.

He was already financially literate as a teen