Upstox - CEO rubbishes claims from multiple employees

500 cr, wow. Will be great to see the returns on this huge spend.
On a different note, it does take a lot of creativity and ambition to burn through 500 cr in 18 months. 1 cr per day. 😁

Speaking of returns there is a yourstory article from around Apr'22 where the founders posed as superhumans with cape and all. There were claims of user count crossing 1cr and Upstox being ahead of Zerodha. SEBI has a rule to mark demat accounts as dormant (can not trade again until KYC is done again) if there are no trades in last 12 months. Upstox has slipped to 4th from 2nd in market share (active user count) losing about 500 bps since the article due to the rule. Current active count was 32 lakhs in Mar'23 as per NSE data. Upstox was gifting new users ETFs worth Rs. 100 on account opening. This artificially pushed up the active user count and its market share. So the slip was bound to happen after 12 months. Users were acquired through referral scheme and all these accounts were opened just to make easy referral money and not for trading in the markets. Referral Scheme: Refer someone and earn referral money if the referee trades. Referral benefit was upto Rs 1200 per refferal at its peak. Referree just bought penny stocks - just buy and sell shares for like Rs 10 and the referer gets 1200.

What’s exactly the engineering culture like?

I talked to a bunch of employees (6-7) on LinkedIn cuz I'm expecting an offer from them, all these guys were praising the work culture, saying that's it like a regular startup where some days you need to push extra but otherwise it's chill, and you get to learn a lot.

After reading this article, color me surprised.