Groww’s quiet leap and the silent rise of confidential IPO filings

It wasn’t a founder tweet or a front-page announcement that confirmed Groww had moved closer to going public. It was a notice—a small, plain text ad buried in a business daily—that told the world that the $3 billion-valued investment platform, currently India’s largest stockbroker by active clients, had filed its Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP) with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). The filing itself wasn’t public. Groww had opted to file confidentially—a route introduced by SEBI in 2022 that lets companies initiate the IPO process under a veil of secrecy.

Over the past year, this novel and largely unheralded provision has quietly gained traction across India’s startup ecosystem. Swiggy, PhysicsWallah, boAt, Shiprocket, Oyo, and now Groww have all chosen to go down this path as they marched towards their respective public listings, marking it out as the go-to choice for late-stage, valuation-sensitive companies that want to avoid early scrutiny, control timing, and manage perception ahead of a final IPO push.

The reasons for this affinity stem from the wave of startup IPOs that hit the Indian markets between 2021 and 2023. Several high-profile firms—Oyo, Pharmeasy, Droom, and others—filed their DRHPs publicly before pausing, revising or withdrawing their listings altogether. These weren’t just business calls. They were reputational setbacks. Every update, every delay, every regulatory comment was a public affair, with that visibility coming at a cost.