After SpaceX's Mega IPO, Brokers Rush to Unlock Wall Street for Indian Investors

The American bourses are seeing a flurry of activity. SpaceX debuted with the largest initial public offering (IPO) ever. AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI are also preparing to deliver consequential tech IPOs. Meanwhile, Databricks, after repeatedly delaying going public, is reportedly eyeing a 2027 bid.

The opportunities are lucrative enough for India's biggest stockbroking platforms to put their foot in the door. They are now racing to give retail investors easier access to Wall Street, as Indian appetite for US equities has grown from a niche pursuit to a mainstream wealth-building strategy.

Zerodha, Groww, Angel One, and Upstox have secured approval from the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) to offer international and US stock investing through GIFT City, the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, according to a Moneycontrol report.

They are not first movers, though. Raise Securities, which runs the trading app Dhan, enabled US stock access earlier in June, and SAMCO Securities followed soon after with its own broker-dealer licence. 

Players like INDmoney have been offering international investing for years now. What's changed is that India's largest broking platforms by user base are now entering the arena, turning what was a niche product into something closer to table stakes.

SpaceX Lit the Fuse

The immediate trigger for the momentum is SpaceX, which completed the largest IPO in history on June 12, raising $85.7 billion after surpassing its $75 billion target, valuing the space tech company at roughly $1.77 trillion. The stock has since climbed nearly 15%, with the market capitalisation touching $2.44 trillion.

However, much of the initial euphoria faded in the following days. By June 23, the stock had slipped to around $147.1 per share, below its IPO price of $150.

In an interaction with AIM, Nikhil Behl, Co-founder and CEO of Stocks at INDmoney, says the platform saw an extraordinary trading activity following SpaceX’s listing. He estimates that somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of all buying and selling on INDmoney's US stocks platform was happening on that one stock alone.

“SpaceX is one of those companies which also has a lot of interest to the point that… approximately 20% of all the buying and selling on the platform was happening only on the SpaceX stock. It's unprecedented. It's just a reflection of the amount of interest that is there in that company,” Behl says.

He likenes the pattern to what Indian brokerages saw around marquee domestic listings such as Zomato and Swiggy—a burst of excitement around listing day that fades as the market settles on a price—and expects the same cycle to repeat when OpenAI and Anthropic come to market.

Next up are Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which have confidentially filed for IPOs with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1. According to Reuters, OpenAI is eyeing a $1 trillion valuation. Meanwhile, Anthropic recently closed a $65 billion funding round that valued the company at roughly $965 billion.

For Indian brokerages, the read-through is straightforward. If SpaceX could pull a quarter of trading volume into a single stock for a few days, two more trillion-dollar listings later this year and into 2027 are a reasonable bet for broking platforms to get an IFSCA approval.

Ankit Garg, Founder and CEO of Wealthy Nivesh, an India- and UAE-based wealth management and investment platform, says that India simply doesn't have AI-pure-play listed companies the way the US does, so an investor who specifically wants exposure to that theme has nowhere to go domestically.

Moreover, the investment sentiment on American and Indian bourses beyond tech also tells two very different stories. 

Dow Jones, the stock market index of 30 prominent companies listed in the US, has grown approximately 6.5% year-to-date, driven by strong corporate profits and monetary policy easing. On the other hand, the Sensex has plunged more than 9% YTD amid the sell-off of IT stocks and the continuing outflow of foreign portfolio and institutional investments.

Adding to that, the rupee has fallen approximately 9.5% against the dollar, making potential US investments far more lucrative as any gains generated in dollars translate into higher returns in rupees. 

The currency factor may prove as important as the IPOs themselves. Ankur Choudhary, Co-founder and CEO of Belong, a fintech startup focused on serving non-resident Indians (NRIs), says that Indian investors are increasingly evaluating US equities not only for potential stock gains but also for the benefits of dollar exposure.

“Nominal returns have not been great for the Indian market, and once you adjust them for INR-USD depreciation, it's even worse. If I invest in a US ETF or a company and the rupee keeps depreciating, I'm benefiting simply because I've converted my INR into USD and invested in that. And if the company also does well, then that's even better,” he explains.

Under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) set by the RBI, resident individuals can send up to $250,000 abroad per financial year. This allowance applies to all permitted current and capital account transactions combined.

Regulatory Architecture 

The GAP (Global Access Provider) framework that underpins all of this was, by design, meant to pull money out of grey-market channels. The framework essentially creates a transparent and secure gateway for retail investors to buy foreign stocks, bonds, and ETFs. 

GAPs must route every client fund through IFSC banking units or IFSCA-authorised payment providers. IFSCA lowered the entry bar this year, cutting the net-worth requirement for GAPs from $1 million to $500,000 and setting a $100,000 floor for "introducing brokers" to refer clients onward, a tweak explicitly aimed at letting more domestic platforms qualify.

Zerodha's own preparations capture how recently this became possible. At an "Ask Me Anything" session earlier this year, Founder and Chief Executive Nithin Kamath said he first explored US stock investing for Zerodha back in 2020, but the plan stalled over the complexity of remittance rules. He confirmed the company was finally building the product, while Chief Technology Officer Kailash Nadh credited the GIFT City route for finally giving the company the regulatory clarity it had been waiting for.

Viram Shah, Founder and Chief Executive of Vested Finance, which recently secured its own GAP licence, framed the shift as ‘structural’. “What’s interesting about US stocks is that you not only get exposure to the United States but also to the world, as many companies have global operations but are listed there,” he wrote in a blog post.

The Participation Gap

For all the noise, actual Indian participation in US markets remains a rounding error next to the domestic market. NSE's unique registered investor count crossed 13.1 crore (131 million) by the end of May 2026.

While there is no single official regulatory figure, Behl put the share of those investors who also hold US stocks at somewhere below 5%. Despite years of marketing, he adds that even committed users typically keep US exposure to a modest slice of their overall portfolio, often 10–15%, rather than treating it as a parallel core holding.

According to ‘India’s Digital Investment Market Report’ by consulting firm Redseer, 57% of investors aware of US/global stocks are not investing in them, with these stocks getting the last place on the list of digital investment products the Indian investors have ever invested in (at around 10%).

With four of India's largest brokerages now cleared to enter the space, and Anthropic and OpenAI's IPOs still ahead on the calendar, the real test for this round of GIFT City approvals isn't whether Indian investors are curious about US tech stocks. It's whether broader, cheaper access translates into durable, diversified participation or whether each new mega-IPO simply produces another short, hype-driven spike.