Unvault Has Unlocked $150 Million in Hidden Jewelry Wealth

Unvault, a Palo Alto-based financial platform for personal gold, has helped users unlock more than $150 million in assets since launching in June 2025. Co-founder Nidhi Singhvi says the company tapped into what she calls a "$750 billion asset class hiding in plain sight."

Singhvi grew up in Jaipur, India's gemstone hub, where gold jewelry is a family heirloom passed down through generations and always counted in someone's net worth, she told Entrepreneur. When she moved to the U.S. about 14 years ago, she found a 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."

Singhvi graduated from The Wharton School with an MBA and focused on currency investing at a hedge fund before building an options trading desk at a crypto brokerage. Her interest in jewelry never faded. "Gold is the OG asset class," she says.

In 2024, she and fellow Wharton graduate Navya Reddy co-founded Sonalore, a company selling 18-karat gold jewelry with a lifetime buyback guarantee. Customers soon returned with a recurring request: they already owned significant jewelry but had no idea what it was worth.

"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."

From valuation app to selling platform

The co-founders pivoted and launched Unvault in June 2025. By October, they had built the platform's first valuation app using AI. Not having raised outside money at the time pushed them to become AI natives and "use everything that was available on the AI front," Singhvi notes.

The app photographed 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."

Within the same month as launch, customers asked to sell their jewelry directly on the platform. Unvault added the option and opened a PO box in Palo Alto to receive items. "People were shipping thousands of dollars of jewelry to us," Singhvi recalls. She drove there herself to pick up the pieces.

"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."

Transparency anchors the selling process. Unvault records video at every step, from opening the box to testing gold in an 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."

Convincing Silicon Valley

Fundraising brought 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?'"

One investor told her women don't wear jewelry, explaining that his wife wears only 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 traction numbers made the case. Unvault logged its first $1 million of tracked assets in 27 days, then crossed $2 million in five more. By the time fundraising began, the company had $5 million in assets logged. "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 most recently raised early-stage capital in June 2026. The amount has not been disclosed.

What comes next

Singhvi and Reddy continue to solicit customer feedback — they have even placed golden eggs in San Francisco's Dolores Park to collect opinions. Customers now want to track inherited assets and expand beyond jewelry to silverware and other collectibles. Bloomberg reported that older generations will pass down $93 trillion in assets to heirs over the next two decades.

"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."