When Nithin Kamath met Karthik Rangappa: The journey from international investor account sales pitch to heading Varsity

Zerodha co-founder Nithin Kamath has credited Karthik Rangappa with playing a central role in building the brokerage’s financial education platform, Zerodha Varsity, saying the initiative’s success would not have been possible without him.

In a post on X, Kamath recounted his association with Rangappa, saying the two first met around 2005 when Kamath was attempting to sell him an international investing account.

“I remember going to his office, and we hit it off almost instantly,” Kamath said, adding that Rangappa later helped build Zerodha’s first website through a friend, when the company was still operating under the name Kamath Associates.

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Rangappa subsequently worked with Kamath for a period before moving to France to pursue a master’s degree in finance. After returning to India, he was working on financial education when Kamath approached him in 2013 to build that function at Zerodha.

Kamath said Zerodha’s reputation for financial education was closely tied to Rangappa and Varsity, the brokerage’s free learning platform covering topics including investing, markets and personal finance.
He highlighted Rangappa’s continued involvement with the platform, noting that even after 13 years, he still responds to queries on Varsity. Over the past three years, Kamath said, Rangappa had further expanded the platform’s impact through text-based content, videos, live sessions and offline initiatives, with the help of the wider team.The Zerodha co-founder also shared an anecdote about their university days. Kamath and Rangappa were in the last batch at Bangalore University to be governed by the institution’s “all-carry” system, which allowed students to carry uncleared subjects from the first semester through the eighth semester and beyond.

Kamath said he had accumulated around 45 subjects by the eighth semester and never cleared them, while Rangappa had about 36 subjects remaining. Unlike Kamath, however, Rangappa returned after the eighth semester and cleared all of them.

“Full respect for that. You don’t find many people who can do that,” Kamath said.

Kamath also stressed that Varsity was not built primarily as a customer-acquisition tool for Zerodha. He said the company had never focused on determining how many of Varsity’s millions of registered email users were Zerodha customers.

“Not once in all these years have our discussions been about how Zerodha benefits from Varsity,” Kamath said.