Billionbrains Garage Ventures, parent of investment platform Groww, is building its own in-house AI stack to bring down its compute costs, said co-founder and CEO Lalit Keshre.
“We are building our own in-house stack. So it will reduce our per token cost. If we had relied on third-party commercial models, our cost would have been much higher,” Keshre said during Q2 FY27 earnings call.
Over the past few months, Groww has rolled out new AI products across trading, bonds and wealth management. At the Groww Next 2026 event, for instance, the company unveiled GR-1, an AI investing assistant.
The AI tool reads markets, tracks news sentiment and provides personalised insights based on a user’s portfolio. However, it does not execute trades automatically. Users must explicitly approve any action, and the feature is opt-in.
As Groww increasingly integrates AI across its operations, its consumption of tokens has increased, and so have its compute costs.
Cost to serve rose 24% to Rs 206 crore in Q2 FY27 from Rs 166 crore in Q1 FY27, while cost to grow declined 29% quarter-on-quarter to Rs 105 crore.
“Cost to serve primarily has cost related to transactions and costs related to technology from our side. And whereas cost to grow is primarily, you can say, growth-related cost, where we spend some part of that in brand building, some part of that in performance marketing as well,” Ishan Bansal, co-founder and CFO of Groww, explained.
Bansal attributed the rise in cost to serve in the July-September quarter to AI-related costs, higher compute spend driven by AI workloads and higher number of trading days, and one-time client reimbursements.
Groww integrates Fisdom’s Wealth offerings
In May 2025, Groww announced it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire wealth management platform Fisdom for $150 million. It completed the acquisition last October following SEBI’s approval. Now, the company has integrated Fisdom’s wealthtech offerings onto its own platforms.
“We completed the Fisdom integration during the quarter, which will now enable us to provide Wealth offerings across multiple platforms,” Groww said in a shareholders’ letter.
Currently, the company offers the following products across its platforms:
- Groww: Bonds and MF Prime
- W: Mutual Funds, Insurance, AIF, PMS, in-house MF PMS, supported by wealth partners
- Fisdom: Mutual Funds, supported by bank partners
Bansal separately confirmed that “the Fisdom users are actually included now in active customers”. In line with this, active users on Groww rose 5% to 18.2 million in Q2 FY27 from 17.3 million in the preceding quarter. On a year-on-year basis, active users grew 23% from 14.8 million.
How Groww plans to pull customers away from other investment platforms
Groww’s “915” product — built for power traders who place heavy F&O order flow — is “not a significant contributor to the trading volume today,” according to Bansal. The company’s goal, he said, is to pull traders away from rival platforms rather than upgrading existing customers.
“Our expectation is obviously to increase the market share in the power trader segment, and hence the focus was not on our customers graduating, but the focus was on customers from other platform coming to us.”
Separately, Keshre said the US-stock investing product, currently in beta, has drawn strong customer feedback.
“As we have done with any product that we have launched so far, we go slow. We continue listening to the customers and keep making changes on what they are saying and continue launching,” he said.
According to a Moneycontrol report, Groww began a phased roll out of US stock investment on its app last month. The feature is likely to be available to all users in the coming days.
When pressed for a beta-to-full-launch timeline, Keshre said, “I don’t think we have a timeline like this.”
Broking orders decline
The number of orders executed on Groww declined 8% quarter-on-quarter to 517.3 million from 560.2 million in Q1 FY27, even as total transacting users increased from 22.9 million to 24.1 million.
Groww’s margin trading facility (MTF) loan book rose sharply to Rs 4,351 crore in Q2 FY27, up 15% from Rs 3,775 crore in the previous quarter. On a year-on-year basis, it surged 2.6x from Rs 1,668 crore.
MTF is a SEBI-approved product that lets traders buy stocks by paying only a fraction (margin) of the total value. The stockbroker funds the rest and charges an interest on that loan.
Groww saw its net profit decline 1% quarter-on-quarter to Rs 725 crore in Q2 FY27, while operating revenue remained largely flat at Rs 1,502 crore.
Notably, Groww also spoke out against MDR on UPI on the analysts’ call. CFO Bansal said that a Rs 300 cap on UPI MDR for capital market transactions “is not affordable” for stockbrokers, as customers often transfer money into broker-wallets but do not execute a trade.
Also read:
- Rs 300 cap on UPI MDR ‘not affordable’ for stockbrokers, says Groww
- Groww Q4 FY26 Earnings Call: Customer acquisition funnel shifts from stocks to mutual funds, ETFs
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