Key Takeaways
- After graduating with her MBA, Singhvi wanted to tap into a $750 billion business opportunity.
- She co-founded Unvault, which allows users to track the value of their jewelry and sell it, in 2025.
- Now, she looks forward to listening to her customers and introducing more in-demand features.
In India’s gemstone hub Jaipur, where Nidhi Singhvi grew up, gold jewelry is a family heirloom passed through generations, and it’s always considered when calculating someone’s net worth, she tells Entrepreneur.
However, when Singhvi moved to the U.S. about 14 years ago, she noticed a very different attitude toward the asset.
“ Jewelry was always done stupidly,” Singhvi says. “It’s so marked up when you buy it, and if you want to sell it, like a broken chain or earring, your infrastructure is a pawn shop or a local jeweler.”
The wheels were turning as Singhvi graduated from The Wharton School with her MBA and launched her career. She focused on currency investing at a hedge fund, then built an options trading desk at a crypto brokerage.
But Singhvi’s interest in the jewelry business never waned. “Gold is the OG asset class,” she says.
So, in 2024, she co-founded Sonalore, a company offering 18-karat gold jewelry with a lifetime buyback guarantee, with fellow Wharton graduate Navya Reddy.
But it wasn’t long before Sonalore’s customers came back with a frequent request: They already owned a lot of jewelry, but they didn’t know how much it was worth — could Singhvi and Reddy help with that?
“The way the customers pushed us was the revelation there,” Singhvi says. “They know it’s an investment. Ask any woman. She treats her jewelry differently than everything else. But what’s the value of it? For an asset to be a true asset, you need to know the value of it.”
Co-founding Unvault to unlock $750 billion in assets
Singhvi and Reddy immediately pivoted to meet customer demand. The co-founders launched Unvault, a financial platform for personal gold, the “$750 billion asset class hiding in plain sight,” in Palo Alto, California in June 2025.
By October of that year, Singhvi and Reddy had leveraged AI to build their platform’s first valuation app.
Not having raised money at the time was a significant advantage, as it motivated them to become AI natives and “use everything that was available on the AI front,” Singhvi notes.
Unvault’s app took photos of customers’ jewelry and used volumetric data to estimate value.
“We used all our training from being in jewelry for a year already to make that assessment better,” Singhvi explains. “Even though at that time we were using frontier [AI] models, we still used our layer of understanding of jewelry to give better results. And that took off.”
Customer requests lead to the option to sell jewelery
Customers soon expressed a desire to sell their jewelry on the platform, so Unvault added the option within the same month of launch. The company opened a PO box to receive the items in Palo Alto. “People were shipping thousands of dollars of jewelry to us,” Singhvi recalls. And she would drive there herself to pick the pieces up.
“We built Unvault for knowing the value and for tracking the value,” Singhvi says. “But the selling was a use case that customers gave it.”
Fostering transparency has been key within that selling component too, Singhvi notes. Unvault provides video throughout the whole process to keep customers informed at every step, from opening the box of jewelry to testing gold in the X-ray machine.
“So it will tell you exactly, it’s 17.34-karat gold,” Singhvi says. “Then we will give you a complete breakdown. So it’s not one number for a bunch of your jewelry items. It’ll be a number for every single item, and then the fees are broken down as well.”
Navigating Silicon Valley investors who want $1 trillion
Despite the early customer interest, when it came time to raise money from Silicon Valley investors, the co-founders faced some pushback.
“ Everyone wants to back a trillion-dollar company,” Singhvi says. “They want to back Anthropic, and I understand it. If I am making that decision, I want to do that as well. So there’s definitely some of that. They’re like, ‘Oh, gold jewelry, can you be $1 trillion?’”
For example, one investor told Singhvi that women don’t wear jewelry. He explained that his wife just wears a few pieces: earrings, a ring and a bracelet.
“By the way, that’s a few thousand dollars right there,” Singhvi says. “But women do have jewelry. Jewelry predates agriculture. It has taken a lot of different forms, but there is an industry that is working, and you are a participant in it whether you like it or not.”
The good news, according to Singhvi? As long as there’s a customer to prove the market, it’s only a matter of time before investors respond. Unvault had that customer from the start — asking the question that led to the company’s very existence.
“VCs are very good at [smelling] customer traction,” Singhvi says. “Everyone that partnered with us [did so] once we started getting customer traction, once they started seeing that curve go up.”
Unvault saw its first $1 million of assets tracked in 27 days, then crossed the $2 million milestone in five. By the time the company began fundraising, it boasted $5 million of assets logged.
Unvault most recently raised early-stage capital in June 2026. The amount hasn’t yet been disclosed.
To date, the company’s helped users unlock more than $150 million in assets.
The importance of customer feedback at every stage
Singhvi and Reddy have continued to solicit customer feedback wherever possible (they’ve even placed golden eggs in Dolores Park to catch attention and collect opinions), cognizant of just how valuable it’s been at every stage of Unvault’s journey.
Not only does it boost their confidence in their offering, but it keeps them agile enough to fulfill the next customer request.
Now, those customers are asking for the option to track inherited assets and expand beyond jewelry to include items like silverware or other collectibles. Older generations will pass down $93 trillion in assets to their heirs in the next two decades, Bloomberg reported.
Singhvi looks forward to building out Unvault’s inheritance feature and continuing to listen to its customers. And she suggests any entrepreneur who wants to be successful do the same.
“ Whatever way you can get customer feedback, and customer feedback at some scale, is great,” Singhvi says. “That will just help building the product, help you be a better founder, and then also help you raise money eventually.”
Key Takeaways
- After graduating with her MBA, Singhvi wanted to tap into a $750 billion business opportunity.
- She co-founded Unvault, which allows users to track the value of their jewelry and sell it, in 2025.
- Now, she looks forward to listening to her customers and introducing more in-demand features.
In India’s gemstone hub Jaipur, where Nidhi Singhvi grew up, gold jewelry is a family heirloom passed through generations, and it’s always considered when calculating someone’s net worth, she tells Entrepreneur.
However, when Singhvi moved to the U.S. about 14 years ago, she noticed a very different attitude toward the asset.
“ Jewelry was always done stupidly,” Singhvi says. “It’s so marked up when you buy it, and if you want to sell it, like a broken chain or earring, your infrastructure is a pawn shop or a local jeweler.”
