India’s largest stock brokerage, Zerodha, is known for disrupting the financial industry with its tech-first approach. But beyond fintech, the company is quietly building a global reputation for something far more fundamental by contributing to the growth of open-source technology.
Recently, Kailash Nadh, the CTO of Zerodha, shared a post marking the first anniversary of FLOSS/fund (Free/Libre/Open Source Software), an initiative by Zerodha that provides $1 million each year to support important open-source software projects around the world.
The company announced the second tranche of 2025, worth $675,000. Combined with the earlier tranche of $325,000, the fund has now completed its planned annual allocation.
“$1million per year is not even a drop in the ocean when considering the size and depth of the global FOSS ecosystem,” Nadh told AIM. He added that the fact that multi-billion- and trillion-dollar corporations don’t do this is mind-boggling.
According to Nadh, financial sustainability continues to be a major challenge for the global FOSS (free and open-source software) ecosystem, though awareness around the issue is steadily growing. “Ironically, even if you do want to give money to FOSS projects, it’s not easy to do so, especially in a country like India with significant amounts of red tape,” he said.
FLOSS/fund has already funded major global projects such as Blender, FFmpeg, OpenStreetMap, F-Droid, and KDE, among many others.
Nadh pointed out that despite the vast amount of FOSS consumed across India’s industry, government, and academia, the country’s contributions remain “close to negligible.” However, he noted a visible shift in recent years, driven by grassroots tech communities engaging with the FOSS United Foundation.
“It feels like the beginning of a movement that’s on its way to reach a critical mass,” he said, adding that the change is emerging from independent developers rather than the larger industry or startup ecosystem.
Non-Thematic Fund for Open Collaboration
In his blog post, Nadh said that what makes FLOSS/fund unique is its non-thematic and open-ended approach, and it does not limit itself to any single category, like developer tools or humanitarian projects. Instead, it evaluates each project on its own merit.
According to Nadh, this diversity brings both opportunity and complexity.
“How does one compare a decades-old, widely used project with a new experimental one that holds great promise but uncertain success?” he said. “They must all be viewed through their own lenses — and that’s pretty damn hard under the umbrella of a fund.”
To streamline project evaluation, FOSS/fund plans to introduce a community-driven selection process through the FOSS United Foundation, a partner ecosystem deeply involved in FOSS/fund’s execution and outreach.
Zerodha is Not Alone
India’s open-source movement is getting new supporters among its tech companies. A closer look at firms like Meesho, Zomato, and Ola’s Krutrim AI Labs, along with others such as PhonePe and Swiggy, shows that the country’s tech ecosystem is becoming more mature in how it uses and contributes to open-source software.
Meesho recently open-sourced its in-house ML platform, BharatMLStack, a production-grade system for real-time inference and model management. It includes a feature store, orchestration system, and monitoring tools, built to deliver sub-10-millisecond inference latency.
Zomato, on the other hand, represents a slightly different stage in India’s open-source adoption story. The food delivery and dining platform is a heavy consumer of open-source technology and is gradually becoming a contributor.
Internally, Zomato’s analytics and data platforms are powered by Trino (formerly PrestoSQL). This open-source distributed SQL engine allows the company to query data across Hive, MySQL, Druid, and MongoDB.
They also leverage Apache Druid, another open-source data store used for real-time analytics, and their migration to AWS Graviton instances helped reduce compute costs by 30%.
On the contribution side, Zomato’s engineers have started releasing their own tools to the public. A notable example is Espresso, a high-performance PDF generation and signing framework written in Go and Chromium, which reduced server costs by 90%.
At the same time, Bhavish Aggarwal’s Krutrim AI is expanding its open-source efforts in the field of AI. The company has open-sourced multiple foundational models and tools designed for Indian contexts, such as Dhwani, a speech-to-text model for Indic languages, and Krutrim Translate, a multilingual translation model.
It also released Vyakhyarth, a sentence-embedding model for regional languages, and BharatBench, a vision-language benchmark tailored for Indian AI research.
Similarly, CRED, which sells itself on design and user experience, has open-sourced its 4th generation design system, NeoPOP, which is inspired by the philosophy and aesthetic principles of the Neo-pop movement.
A public repository on Flipkart’s GitHub, with over 5,000 stars, called RecyclerList View, provides a high-performance list view component for React Native and web applications. One of PhonePe’s public repositories’, Mantis, is a security framework designed to automate the workflow of asset discovery and vulnerability scanning.
Nadh also mentioned India’s growing investment in digital infrastructure, particularly through initiatives such as the IndiaAI Mission, which is funding the creation of open-source large language models (LLMs) and AI tools using public money.
The IndiaAI Mission, backed by the Indian government, aims to make AI resources accessible to startups, researchers, and public institutions. Nadh argued that such national efforts cannot succeed without a strong foundation of open-source software. “The Government of India is strategically pro-FOSS,” he wrote. “Everything from large government systems to much of the new-age tech industry is built on FOSS.”
The post India’s FOSS Contributions Remain Negligible Despite Heavy Adoption, Says Zerodha CTO appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
