Key Takeaways
- After graduating alongside her MBA, Singhvi wanted to access a $750 milliard endeavor opportunity.
- She co-founded Unvault, which allows users to track the value of their jewelry and market it, in 2025.
- Now, she looks onward to listening to her customers and introducing additional in-demand features.
In India’s gemstone hub Jaipur, anywhere Nidhi Singhvi grew up, aureate jewelry is a family heirloom passed through generations, and it’s continually considered whenever calculating someone’s net worth, she tells Entrepreneur.
However, whenever Singhvi moved to the U.S. concerning 14 years ago, she noticed a extremely distinct outlook toward the asset.
“ Jewelry was continually done stupidly,” Singhvi says. “It’s so marked up whenever you buy it, and if you desire to market it, akin a damaged sequence or earring, your infrastructure is a pawn shop or a local jeweler.”
The wheels were turning as Singhvi graduated from The Wharton School alongside her MBA and launched her career. She focused on prosperity investing at a hedge fund, afterward built an options selling array at a crypto brokerage.
But Singhvi’s involvement in the jewelry endeavor never waned. “Gold is the OG asset class,” she says.
So, in 2024, she co-founded Sonalore, a business offering 18-karat aureate jewelry alongside a life buyback guarantee, alongside chap Wharton alumnus Navya Reddy.
But it wasn’t lengthy before Sonalore’s customers came rear alongside a common request: They already owned a lot of jewelry, but they didn’t cognize how much it was value — could Singhvi and Reddy assistance alongside that?
“The way the customers pushed us was the revelation there,” Singhvi says. “They cognize it’s an investment. Ask any woman. She treats her jewelry alternatively than everything else. But what’s the value of it? For an asset to be a true asset, you need to cognize the value of it.”
Co-founding Unvault to unlock $750 milliard in assets
Singhvi and Reddy immediately pivoted to encounter client demand. The co-founders launched Unvault, a financial phase for individual gold, the “$750 billion asset category 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 archetypal evaluation app.
Not having raised prosperity at the period was a important advantage, as it motivated them to rotate into AI natives and “use everything that was accessible on the AI front,” Singhvi notes.
Unvault’s app took photos of customers’ jewelry and used volumetric data to evaluation value.
“We used all our training from being in jewelry for a twelvemonth already to create that appraisal better,” Singhvi explains. “Even although at that period we were using frontier [AI] models, we motionless used our tier of understanding of jewelry to provision improved results. And that took off.”
Customer requests guide to the choice to market jewelery
Customers shortly expressed a desire to market their jewelry on the platform, so Unvault added the choice inside the identical duration of launch. The business opened a PO box to obtain the items in Palo Alto. “People were shipping thousands of dollars of jewelry to us,” Singhvi recalls. And she would run there herself to choice the pieces up.
“We built Unvault for knowing the value and for tracking the value,” Singhvi says. “But the marketing was a use case that customers gave it.”
Fostering transparency has been key inside that marketing component too, Singhvi notes. Unvault provides video throughout the entire procedure to keep customers informed at all step, from beginning the box of jewelry to evaluation aureate in the X-ray machine.
“So it volition inform you exactly, it’s 17.34-karat gold,” Singhvi says. “Then we volition provision you a complete breakdown. So it’s not one figure for a bunch of your jewelry items. It’ll be a figure for all sole item, and afterward the fees are damaged downward as well.”
Navigating Silicon Valley investors who desire $1 trillion
Despite the first client interest, whenever it came period to lift prosperity from Silicon Valley investors, the co-founders faced several pushback.
“ Everyone wants to rear a trillion-dollar company,” Singhvi says. “They desire to rear Anthropic, and I comprehend it. If I am making that decision, I desire to do that as well. So there’s certainly several of that. They’re like, ‘Oh, aureate jewelry, can you be $1 trillion?’”
For example, one capitalist told Singhvi that women don’t deteriorate jewelry. He explained that his spouse fair wears a few pieces: earrings, a circle and a bracelet.
“By the way, that’s a few thousand dollars correct there,” Singhvi says. “But women do have jewelry. Jewelry predates agriculture. It has taken a lot of distinct forms, but there is an industry that is working, and you are a attendee in it whether you akin it or not.”
The fine news, according to Singhvi? As lengthy as there’s a client to prove the market, it’s lone a matter of period before investors respond. Unvault had that client from the start — asking the inquiry that led to the company’s extremely existence.
“VCs are extremely fine at [smelling] customer traction,” Singhvi says. “Everyone that partnered alongside us [did so] formerly we started getting client traction, formerly they started seeing that curve go up.”
Unvault saw its archetypal $1 myriad of resources tracked in 27 days, afterward traversed the $2 myriad milestone in five. By the period the business began fundraising, it boasted $5 myriad of resources logged.
Unvault most lately raised early-stage chief in June 2026. The amount hasn’t yet been disclosed.
The importance of client feedback at all stage
Singhvi and Reddy have continued to solicit customer feedback anywhere imaginable (they’ve equal placed aureate eggs in Dolores Park to capture notice and collect opinions), cognizant of fair how precious it’s been at all phase of Unvault’s journey.
Not lone does it boost their confidence in their offering, but it keeps them agile adequate to fulfill the next client request.
Now, those customers are asking for the choice to track inherited resources and develop beyond jewelry to contain items akin silverware or another collectibles. Older generations volition continue downward $93 trillion in resources to their heirs in the next two decades, Bloomberg reported.
Singhvi looks onward to construction out Unvault’s bequest characteristic and continuing to hear to its customers. And she suggests any entrepreneur who wants to be prosperous do the same.
“ Whatever way you can get client feedback, and client feedback at several scale, is great,” Singhvi says. “That volition fair assistance construction the product, assistance you be a improved founder, and afterward additionally assistance you lift prosperity eventually.”
