The LSE Directory / Retail brokers
Upstox is an Indian retail brokerage operated by Upstox Securities Private Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of RKSV Securities India Private Limited. Through its Upstox Pro mobile app and web platform, it lets Indian residents trade and invest in equities, futures and options, commodities, currencies, mutual funds, IPOs and digital gold across the NSE, BSE and MCX. The platform layers in TradingView based charting, marketed as "Upstox x TradingView," offering up to eight charts at once, more than 100 indicators and over 80 drawing tools, alongside adjacent products such as fixed deposits, NCDs, personal loans, National Pension System accounts and insurance. As a discount broker, Upstox charges a flat fee of up to Rs 20 per executed order on intraday, F&O, commodity and currency trades, with zero brokerage on equity delivery trades and mutual funds, undercutting the percentage-based commissions of full-service houses. It competes for India's high-volume retail and derivatives traders against other flat-fee brokers such as Zerodha, Groww and Angel One, differentiating mainly on app speed, charting depth via the TradingView tie-up, and a broad in-app bundle of adjacent financial products rather than research or relationship-manager services. The company traces to RKSV Securities, founded in 2009 by brothers Ravi Kumar and Raghu Kumar together with Shrinivas "Shrini" Viswanath; the retail platform was rebranded Upstox in 2016, when Kavitha Subramanian joined as a co-founder. Raghu Kumar stepped back from day-to-day operations in December 2019 to start a separate venture but remained the company's largest individual shareholder. Upstox has raised capital across several funding rounds from investors including Tiger Global Management, reported to hold roughly a 31 percent stake, Kalaari Capital, and, until his death in October 2024, Ratan Tata as an individual backer; it reached unicorn status in November 2021 at a valuation of roughly $3.4 billion. It is SEBI-registered (INZ000315837), holds trading member codes on the NSE, BSE and MCX, and operates as a depository participant with CDSL. It reports more than 1.3 crore (13 million-plus) registered users and, on recent NSE active-client counts, has ranked around fourth among Indian brokers behind Groww, Zerodha and Angel One. Fiscal 2026 was a soft period for the Indian discount-brokerage sector generally: industry-wide active NSE client counts fell from about 4.92 crore to 4.57 crore as two years of weak retail market returns cooled trading activity, with reporting naming Upstox among the brokers, alongside HDFC Securities, Kotak Securities and Motilal Oswal Securities, that saw active-client declines over the period.
