Key Takeaways
- After graduating along with her MBA, Singhvi needed to faucet right into a $750 billion enterprise alternative.
- She co-founded Unvault, which permits customers to trace the worth of their jewellery and promote it, in 2025.
- Now, she appears to be like ahead to listening to her prospects and introducing extra in-demand options.
In India’s gemstone hub Jaipur, the place Nidhi Singhvi grew up, gold jewellery is a household heirloom handed via generations, and it’s all the time thought of when calculating somebody’s web value, she tells Entrepreneur.
Nevertheless, when Singhvi moved to the U.S. about 14 years in the past, she observed a really totally different perspective towards the asset.
“ Jewellery was all the time performed stupidly,” Singhvi says. “It’s so marked up while you purchase it, and if you wish to promote it, like a damaged chain or earring, your infrastructure is a pawn store or an area jeweler.”
The wheels had been turning as Singhvi graduated from The Wharton Faculty along with her MBA and launched her profession. She centered on forex investing at a hedge fund, then constructed an choices buying and selling desk at a crypto brokerage.
However Singhvi’s curiosity within the jewellery enterprise by no means waned. “Gold is the OG asset class,” she says.
So, in 2024, she co-founded Sonalore, an organization providing 18-karat gold jewellery with a lifetime buyback assure, with fellow Wharton graduate Navya Reddy.
Nevertheless it wasn’t lengthy earlier than Sonalore’s prospects got here again with a frequent request: They already owned a number of jewellery, however they didn’t understand how a lot it was value — may Singhvi and Reddy assist with that?
“The way in which the prospects pushed us was the revelation there,” Singhvi says. “They comprehend it’s an funding. Ask any girl. She treats her jewellery in another way than every thing else. However what’s the worth of it? For an asset to be a real asset, it’s essential know the worth of it.”
Co-founding Unvault to unlock $750 billion in property
Singhvi and Reddy instantly pivoted to satisfy buyer demand. The co-founders launched Unvault, a monetary platform for private gold, the “$750 billion asset class hiding in plain sight,” in Palo Alto, California in June 2025.
By October of that yr, Singhvi and Reddy had leveraged AI to construct their platform’s first valuation app.
Not having raised cash on the time was a big benefit, because it motivated them to change into AI natives and “use every thing that was accessible on the AI entrance,” Singhvi notes.
Unvault’s app took photographs of shoppers’ jewellery and used volumetric knowledge to estimate worth.
“We used all our coaching from being in jewellery for a yr already to make that evaluation higher,” Singhvi explains. “Though at the moment we had been utilizing frontier [AI] fashions, we nonetheless used our layer of understanding of knickknack to offer higher outcomes. And that took off.”
Buyer requests result in the choice to promote jewelery
Clients quickly expressed a want to promote their jewellery on the platform, so Unvault added the choice throughout the similar month of launch. The corporate opened a PO field to obtain the gadgets in Palo Alto. “Individuals had been delivery 1000’s of {dollars} of knickknack to us,” Singhvi recollects. And he or she would drive there herself to select the items up.
“We constructed Unvault for figuring out the worth and for monitoring the worth,” Singhvi says. “However the promoting was a use case that prospects gave it.”
Fostering transparency has been key inside that promoting element too, Singhvi notes. Unvault gives video all through the entire course of to maintain prospects knowledgeable at each step, from opening the field of knickknack to testing gold within the X-ray machine.
“So it is going to inform you precisely, it’s 17.34-karat gold,” Singhvi says. “Then we will provide you with a whole breakdown. So it’s not one quantity for a bunch of your jewellery gadgets. It’ll be a quantity for each single merchandise, after which the charges are damaged down as effectively.”
Navigating Silicon Valley buyers who need $1 trillion
Regardless of the early buyer curiosity, when it got here time to boost cash from Silicon Valley buyers, the co-founders confronted some pushback.
“ Everybody needs to again a trillion-dollar firm,” Singhvi says. “They wish to again Anthropic, and I perceive it. If I’m making that call, I wish to try this as effectively. So there’s positively a few of that. They’re like, ‘Oh, gold jewellery, are you able to be $1 trillion?’”
For instance, one investor instructed Singhvi that ladies don’t put on jewellery. He defined that his spouse simply wears a couple of items: earrings, a hoop and a bracelet.
“By the best way, that’s a couple of thousand {dollars} proper there,” Singhvi says. “However girls do have jewellery. Jewellery predates agriculture. It has taken a number of totally different types, however there may be an trade that’s working, and you’re a participant in it whether or not you prefer it or not.”
The excellent news, in line with Singhvi? So long as there’s a buyer to show the market, it’s solely a matter of time earlier than buyers reply. Unvault had that buyer from the beginning — asking the query that led to the corporate’s very existence.
“VCs are excellent at [smelling] buyer traction,” Singhvi says. “Everybody that partnered with us [did so] as soon as we began getting buyer traction, as soon as they began seeing that curve go up.”
Unvault noticed its first $1 million of property tracked in 27 days, then crossed the $2 million milestone in 5. By the point the corporate started fundraising, it boasted $5 million of property logged.
Unvault most not too long ago raised early-stage capital in June 2026. The quantity hasn’t but been disclosed.
To this point, the corporate’s helped customers unlock greater than $150 million in property.
The significance of buyer suggestions at each stage
Singhvi and Reddy have continued to solicit buyer suggestions wherever attainable (they’ve even positioned golden eggs in Dolores Park to catch consideration and acquire opinions), cognizant of simply how worthwhile it’s been at each stage of Unvault’s journey.
Not solely does it enhance their confidence of their providing, however it retains them agile sufficient to satisfy the following buyer request.
Now, these prospects are asking for the choice to trace inherited property and broaden past jewellery to incorporate gadgets like silverware or different collectibles. Older generations will go down $93 trillion in property to their heirs within the subsequent twenty years, Bloomberg reported.
Singhvi appears to be like ahead to constructing out Unvault’s inheritance function and persevering with to take heed to its prospects. And he or she suggests any entrepreneur who needs to achieve success do the identical.
“ No matter manner you may get buyer suggestions, and buyer suggestions at some scale, is nice,” Singhvi says. “That may simply assist constructing the product, enable you be a greater founder, after which additionally enable you elevate cash finally.”
Key Takeaways
- After graduating along with her MBA, Singhvi needed to faucet right into a $750 billion enterprise alternative.
- She co-founded Unvault, which permits customers to trace the worth of their jewellery and promote it, in 2025.
- Now, she appears to be like ahead to listening to her prospects and introducing extra in-demand options.
In India’s gemstone hub Jaipur, the place Nidhi Singhvi grew up, gold jewellery is a household heirloom handed via generations, and it’s all the time thought of when calculating somebody’s web value, she tells Entrepreneur.
Nevertheless, when Singhvi moved to the U.S. about 14 years in the past, she observed a really totally different perspective towards the asset.
“ Jewellery was all the time performed stupidly,” Singhvi says. “It’s so marked up while you purchase it, and if you wish to promote it, like a damaged chain or earring, your infrastructure is a pawn store or an area jeweler.”