Groww joins wave of startups shifting domicile to India

Tiger Global-backed financial services startup Groww has shifted its domicile to India from the US, following in the footsteps of peers such as Walmart-backed PhonePe that are setting up their bases in the country.

Groww completed its domicile transition in March, founder and chief executive officer Lalit Keshre posted on social media platform X (the erstwhile Twitter).

“For our customers, we have always been an India-based organisation for all practical purposes since day 1. With this update, the Groww group and its subsidiaries are completely based in India,” Keshre posted on Thursday, a day that which marked Groww’s eighth birth anniversary.

Some Indian startups that are currently based out of Singapore and the US are exploring relocating to India as the regulatory framework back home becomes more favorable and the ease of doing business improves.

The other startups that are currently in the process of moving their bases to India include SoftBank-backed low-price e-commerce platform Meesho and Singapore-based business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform Udaan and merchants’ payments platform Pine Labs.

To be sure, not every Indian startup based abroad may have the resources to fund such a relocation, a process dubbed “reverse flip”.

The government has been pushing for the relocation of these foreign-based startups.

A report by an expert committee tasked with finding had last year suggested tweaks in policies including taxation, infrastructure, company law, and dispute resolution to woo startups that have “flipped: abroad to relocate to the International Financial Services Centre in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, or GIFT City.

Last September, Groww, which is also backed by Peak XV Partners and Ribbit Capital, had surpassed rival Zerodha on the number of active investors.