Key Takeaways
- After graduating together with her MBA, Singhvi wished 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 seems to be ahead to listening to her clients 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 by means of generations, and it’s at all times thought of when calculating somebody’s web value, she tells Entrepreneur.
Nonetheless, when Singhvi moved to the U.S. about 14 years in the past, she observed a really completely different angle towards the asset.
“ Jewellery was at all times executed 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 a neighborhood jeweler.”
The wheels have been turning as Singhvi graduated from The Wharton College together with her MBA and launched her profession. She targeted on foreign money 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.
But it surely wasn’t lengthy earlier than Sonalore’s clients got here again with a frequent request: They already owned quite a lot 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 shoppers pushed us was the revelation there,” Singhvi says. “They realize it’s an funding. Ask any lady. She treats her jewellery otherwise than every thing else. However what’s the worth of it? For an asset to be a real asset, that you must know the worth of it.”
Co-founding Unvault to unlock $750 billion in belongings
Singhvi and Reddy instantly pivoted to fulfill 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 turn out to be AI natives and “use every thing that was out there 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 have been utilizing frontier [AI] fashions, we nonetheless used our layer of understanding of knickknack to provide higher outcomes. And that took off.”
Buyer requests result in the choice to promote jewelery
Prospects quickly expressed a want to promote their jewellery on the platform, so Unvault added the choice inside the identical month of launch. The corporate opened a PO field to obtain the gadgets in Palo Alto. “Folks have been delivery hundreds of {dollars} of knickknack to us,” Singhvi remembers. And she or he would drive there herself to choose 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 clients gave it.”
Fostering transparency has been key inside that promoting part too, Singhvi notes. Unvault gives video all through the entire course of to maintain clients knowledgeable at each step, from opening the field of knickknack to testing gold within the X-ray machine.
“So it would inform you precisely, it’s 17.34-karat gold,” Singhvi says. “Then we provides 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 properly.”
Navigating Silicon Valley traders who need $1 trillion
Regardless of the early buyer curiosity, when it got here time to boost cash from Silicon Valley traders, 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 properly. 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 just a few items: earrings, a hoop and a bracelet.
“By the best way, that’s just a few thousand {dollars} proper there,” Singhvi says. “However girls do have jewellery. Jewellery predates agriculture. It has taken quite a lot of completely 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 traders 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 belongings tracked in 27 days, then crossed the $2 million milestone in 5. By the point the corporate started fundraising, it boasted $5 million of belongings logged.
Unvault most lately 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 belongings.
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 accumulate opinions), cognizant of simply how useful it’s been at each stage of Unvault’s journey.
Not solely does it increase their confidence of their providing, nevertheless it retains them agile sufficient to meet the subsequent buyer request.
Now, these clients are asking for the choice to trace inherited belongings and increase past jewellery to incorporate gadgets like silverware or different collectibles. Older generations will cross down $93 trillion in belongings to their heirs within the subsequent twenty years, Bloomberg reported.
Singhvi seems to be ahead to constructing out Unvault’s inheritance characteristic and persevering with to hearken to its clients. And she or he suggests any entrepreneur who needs to achieve success do the identical.
“ No matter method you will get buyer suggestions, and buyer suggestions at some scale, is nice,” Singhvi says. “That may simply assist constructing the product, make it easier to be a greater founder, after which additionally make it easier to elevate cash finally.”
Key Takeaways
- After graduating together with her MBA, Singhvi wished 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 seems to be ahead to listening to her clients 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 by means of generations, and it’s at all times thought of when calculating somebody’s web value, she tells Entrepreneur.
Nonetheless, when Singhvi moved to the U.S. about 14 years in the past, she observed a really completely different angle towards the asset.
“ Jewellery was at all times executed 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 a neighborhood jeweler.”
