While the world was busy watching Zerodha's broking business navigate a tough year amid regulatory headwinds, a much quieter, much smaller arm of Nithin Kamath's empire just put up numbers that deserve their own spotlight. Zerodha Capital, the company's non-banking financial company (NBFC) and lending arm, has reported its FY26 results — and the growth story keeps getting stronger.
According to data reported by Entrackr and corroborated by ICRA's latest rating disclosures, Zerodha Capital's total income jumped 44.2% year-on-year in FY26 (the financial year ended March 31, 2026), rising to ₹53.5 crore from ₹37.1 crore in FY25. Net profit grew a healthy 20.5% to ₹14.7 crore, up from ₹12.2 crore the previous year.
The engine behind this growth remains simple, if not exactly glamorous: lending against shares and mutual funds. Zerodha Capital offers Loan Against Securities (LAS) with ticket sizes ranging from ₹25,000 to ₹10 crore, letting users pledge holdings inside their Zerodha demat accounts for instant liquidity. That business has scaled fast — the company's loan book climbed to ₹580 crore as of March 31, 2026, even as it continued to report nil gross non-performing assets (GNPAs), a streak that has held since inception in 2021.
Credit rating agency ICRA reaffirmed Zerodha Capital's long-term and short-term ratings at AA- (Stable) and A1+ respectively, while also enhancing the rated amount of its fund-based bank facilities from ₹600 crore to ₹900 crore — a clear signal of growing headroom for the lending business. In a related move, ICRA withdrew its rating on the company's earlier ₹100 crore non-convertible debenture programme, simply because no amount remains outstanding under that facility.
What makes this growth particularly notable is how lean the operation remains. Zerodha Capital continues to lean heavily on the infrastructure, trust, and customer base already built by Zerodha's core broking business — which had 68.5 lakh active NSE clients as of May 2026, representing around 15.02% of the exchange's total active investor base. In effect, Zerodha Capital is monetising an audience that already exists, without the customer acquisition costs that plague most NBFC start-ups.
The company's balance sheet tells a story of scaling, calculated risk. Net worth stood at roughly ₹188 crore, up from ₹170 crore a year earlier, while the gearing ratio rose to 2.4x from 1.5x — a sign that Zerodha Capital is now leaning more on borrowed capital to fund its expanding loan book, even as asset quality stays pristine. ICRA's commentary highlighted the company's strategic importance within the Zerodha Group, citing shared promoters, operational synergies, and access to the brokerage's vast customer base as key supports.
This comes at a time when Zerodha's core broking business has been under real pressure. Founder Nithin Kamath revealed that brokerage revenues fell nearly 40% year-on-year in June 2025, as regulatory changes — higher securities transaction tax on options, fewer weekly expiries, and the removal of exchange transaction charge rebates — began crystallising into real revenue hits. Against that backdrop, a fast-growing, nil-NPA lending arm looks less like a side project and more like exactly the diversification hedge the group has been building toward, deliberately shifting capital allocation toward Margin Trading Facilities and credit lines to insulate the broader business from F&O-linked regulatory risk.
For an industry watching fintech NBFCs struggle with asset quality, funding costs, and investor scepticism following the 2023-24 shake-out in unsecured lending, Zerodha Capital's combination of accelerating income growth, nil NPAs, and an upgraded credit facility stands out as a rare, fully-funded success story — built quietly, without the fanfare of a funding round announcement or a splashy product launch.
The bigger question now is whether Zerodha Capital remains a supporting business or evolves into a standalone growth pillar for the group. With its bank facility limit raised to ₹900 crore and the loan book already at ₹580 crore, the early signs suggest Kamath and his team see this NBFC as far more than a side hustle — it's becoming the group's answer to a regulatory environment that no longer guarantees easy money from options trading alone.
As India's retail investing boom matures and F&O-linked revenue faces structural headwinds, Zerodha Capital's story may well become the blueprint for how broking houses turn customer trust into a second, equally profitable business line.
