India, Sept. 7 -- Zerodha does not want to go public itself. But it wants to be involved in almost everything that happens when another company does.

"To run a brokerage firm is to live with contradictions," Zerodha cofounder Nithin Kamath had written on Substack last month.

"These contradictions have become harder to live with since the business took off post-2020. At least until then, the pursuit of revenue and profits made some of these contradictions easier to rationalize," Kamath added.

It's in this light that we need to study Zerodha's new direction.

Zerodha Corporate Advisors received a nod from the market regulator SEBI on September 1 to operate as a Category-I merchant banker. The subsidiary can now advise companies on IPOs, ...