Silence is golden, speech is silver. An Indian trio defied the old adage. They went vocal and struck gold while dealing in silver.

It wasn’t easy for Ishendra Agarwal, Nikita Prasad, and Sachin Shetty to start up with silver jewellery studded with lab-grown diamonds in a market traditionally obsessed with buying, storing and reselling gold.

Their brainchild, GIVA, started taking baby steps in 2019 as a direct-to-customer (D2C) jewellery ecommerce brand based in Bengaluru. Six years on, it has grown into an INR 505 Cr brand in the silver and lab-grown diamond jewellery space.

While India’s fragmented jewellery market has seen some formalisation with organised jewellery chains like Kalyan Jewellers and PC Jeweller branching out to various cities, digitally native platforms like Bluestone and Tata Group-owned CaratLane rode the ecommerce wave to woo young consumers with evolving tastes.

GIVA was born at the cusp of this transformation, when millennial and Gen Z consumers were exploring virtual platforms for buying precious stones. Through the next two years of the COVID pandemic, ecommerce gathered momentum and fostered the rise of D2C brands in the jewellery vertical.

The first task for GIVA was to modernise silver jewellery as a low-cost option for young Indians, and then it had to resolve the challenge of the trust deficit in Indian consumers while buying jewellery online.

The company set up its first exclusive store in Bengaluru in 2022 after the pandemic as offline retail rebounded and jewellery buyers were more keen on a touch-and-feel factor. The offline channel complemented the virtual presence for a wider market reach.

“A 100% surge in FY25 revenue from INR 250 Cr a year back propelled us to be a formidable market force,” founder and chief executive Agarwal told Inc42 in an exclusive interaction.

CaratLane leads the D2C jewellery market with a topline of INR 3,080 Cr in FY24. Tata Group acquired the startup for a whopping INR 17,000 Cr back in 2023.

While Bluestone, a major competitor of GIVA, plans to raise INR 1,000 Cr from its upcoming public issue, GIVA has so far raised $105 Mn (more than INR 870 Cr) from investors like PeakXV Partners, Premji Invest, Blume Ventures, and Titan Capital.

Call it the newfound love of young Indians for jewellery other than gold, or the revival of consumption, catalysed by the softening of consumer price inflation to 4.6% in FY25 and higher discretionary spending, GIVA’s trajectory of growth in topline is one for the books.

The startup recorded a 66% YoY revenue growth in FY24, although its losses widened to INR 58.6 Cr. Its EBITDA margin in FY25 dropped slightly from -7% to -8% YoY due to offline expansion with the launch of 80 new outlets during the year.

India is the second-largest importer of silver and one of the biggest producers of silver jewellery. While the

© Inc42