Groww's Cost to Serve Rose 24% to ₹206 Crore as Orders Fell 8%, and the CEO Points to AI

Billionbrains Garage Ventures, the parent of the investing app Groww, reported a consolidated net profit of ₹725.65 crore for the quarter ended September 2026, up 54 percent from ₹471.34 crore a year earlier, Upstox reported. Profit fell 1.28 percent from the June quarter. The results were filed Wednesday, October 14.

The line worth reading is below the profit. On the earnings call, co-founder and chief financial officer Ishan Bansal attributed a rise in cost to serve to AI-related costs, higher compute spend from AI workloads, more trading days and one-time client reimbursements, MediaNama reported. The company did not split the ₹40 crore increase among those four causes.

What the quarter looked like

Revenue from operations was ₹1,501.53 crore, up 47.39 percent from ₹1,018.74 crore and flat from June, per Upstox. EBITDA was ₹969 crore at a 64.50 percent margin, against ₹604 crore and 59.29 percent a year earlier. Equity derivatives contributed less than a year ago, which the company attributed to market adjustments after the Closing Auction System was introduced. Margin trading and commodity derivatives contributed more.

Metric	June quarter	September quarter
Cost to serve	₹166 crore	₹206 crore
Orders executed	560.2 million	517.3 million
Active users	17.3 million	18.2 million
Transacting users	22.9 million	24.1 million

Active users include customers of Fisdom, the wealth platform Groww bought, which MediaNama says is now counted. That makes the 23 percent year-on-year growth from 14.8 million less clean than it looks.

Cost per order, on our arithmetic

Cost to serve rose 24 percent while orders executed fell 8 percent. Divide one by the other and cost to serve per order executed went from about ₹2.96 to about ₹3.98, a rise of roughly 34 percent. Cost to serve is not defined in MediaNama's report and may include items that do not scale with orders, so treat the ratio as a direction, not a unit cost.

As a share of operating revenue, cost to serve moved from about 11.1 percent to about 13.7 percent. That is a margin giveback of 2.6 points on one line, set against an EBITDA margin that still rose year on year.

1. June quarter166 ₹ crore
2. September quarter206 ₹ crore

Source: MediaNama, October 15, 2026

The in-house stack

Lalit Keshre, co-founder and chief executive, said on the call: "We are building our own in-house stack. So it will reduce our per token cost." He added that relying on third-party commercial models would have cost the company much more, MediaNama said. No absolute compute figure, GPU count or per-token price was given, so the saving cannot be checked.

The AI product named in the report is GR-1, an investing assistant shown at Groww Next 2026 that reads markets and news sentiment and gives portfolio-based insights. It does not place trades on its own; users must approve any action, and it is opt-in. Whether GR-1 is what drives token volume was not said.

Other lines from the call: net profit fell 1 percent from June; the margin trading book was ₹4,351 crore, up 15 percent on the quarter and 2.6 times the year-ago level; and Bansal said a ₹300 cap on UPI merchant discount rate for capital market transactions "is not affordable" for stockbrokers. Upstox put the market capitalisation at ₹1,22,491.97 crore on October 14.

For how other Indian startups are reporting their own losses, see our coverage of Flipkart's FY26 loss of ₹8,468 crore. Udaan, another Indian startup, disclosed a going-concern note in its FY26 accounts. The December-quarter cost-to-serve line will show whether the in-house stack has started to bend the ratio, since Groww has given no date for it.