Amid Surging Gold Prices, This Valuation Platform Is Turning Heirlooms Into Assets

Jewelry has always doubled as tangible financial power for Nidhi Singhvi. Growing up in Jaipur, India (“the gemstone capital of the world,” she notes), Singhvi watched her mother sell her jewelry to sponsor her spot in an exchange program in Singapore that changed the trajectory of her life.While later building her investment career in the U.S., including stints at McKinsey, a hedge fund and FalconX (where she built a crypto options trading desk), Singhvi observed a surprising lack of infrastructure in the jewelry space: Gold earrings and necklaces remained tucked away in women’s closets, too often seen as inherited baubles rather than lucrative assets.In October 2025, Singhvi launched Unvault, an AI-driven jewelry valuation and authentication platform allowing users to track and manage their own jewelry portfolios. By simply snapping a photo of their pieces and uploading it to the platform, users can discover the estimated current market value of their items from the comfort of their own home — for free. In this way, Unvault eliminates the need for potentially predatory pawn shops and confusing guesswork surrounding the real value of one’s jewelry. Think of it as the “Robinhood for jewelry,” Singhvi says.”Say you used Unvault this January, you’ve already had a 20% increase on your jewelry portfolio,” she adds, referencing the fluctuating gold market. Unvault isn’t only pulling back the curtain on gold valuation, though; it assesses all precious metals and gemstones. Currently, the company tracks around $30 million worth of assets on its platform.
Photo: Courtesy of Unvault
Beyond baseline valuation, Unvault also allows consumers to sell their jewelry if they choose. Users can send in their jewelry for expert authentication, receive an offer (Unvault takes an approximate 15–20% fee) and opt to either sell or keep the item.”Ultimately, we want to be the source of truth for every piece of jewelry,” Singhvi says. “You have something, Unvault is the place to get a value of it.”Ahead, Singhvi shares which types of jewelry retain the most value, her thoughts on the evolving jewelry resale market and more.What inspired you to launch Unvault? What pain points in the jewelry valuation space does Unvault aim to address?Gold is an asset that has done much better than S&P [500] in the last 20 years. Gold, this financial power for most of the women in the country, is kept idle and untracked. It is not part of our wealth. It is something that we don’t know the value of and is one of the most powerful assets in the world.At Unvault, we are building a Robinhood for jewelry. So you can take this asset that’s lying in a drawer, get a value of it, make it a live asset part of your portfolio and then do whatever you want to do with it.
Photo: Courtesy of Unvault
Walk me through Unvault’s jewelry valuation and authentication process.What we do is we take the [uploaded] photo, break it into volumetric data, that’s our AI working in the background. We have trained it on all manufacturing data, so it’s very accurate, and we give you value. Now that value lives in a portfolio.So when you sell it, that is when we get the piece from you and we authenticate that piece. We authenticate, we tell you that this is the value. We have a very transparent breakdown of your jewelry. If you accept it, then you can sell it to us. If not, we ship it back to you at no charge to you. We want you to be empowered to know the value right at the beginning instead of going through the entire process and then figuring out the value.What about the current economic climate makes this the right time for users to turn to Unvault and start looking at their jewelry as a long-term investment?All the popular media is covering [that] gold is at an all-time high. People who didn’t know the value of gold, they now are like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s $5,000 an ounce.’ So this entire generation is getting educated on the price of gold and that’s great, especially for women. It’s an amazing time to build this company because we’ve not had to spend any money on educating people. People are just reading the news, making the connection and finding Unvault very easy to use. We know that women don’t invest as much as men do, and if this is a good on-ramp for them, then that’s an amazing mission to have. We’re very happy to take the movement forward, use this gold education movement and tie it into an investment platform for women where they can start with something that they already own. What types of jewelry typically retain their value the most?Anything that’s made with solid gold. Especially anything high karat — 14 karat and above — is something that has gone up more than your S&P stock. We do see some changes in the diamond market as well. There are a lot of different pressures there through lab diamonds, so that is a little bit more volatile class right now, but gold has done just beautifully.
Photo: Courtesy of Unvault
How does the skyrocketing price of gold and silver impact Unvault’s business?We have moved from $1 million of assets being tracked on Unvault to $30 million of assets being tracked on the platform in a matter of a few months. Because customers have this curiosity, they’re coming in and they are trying to figure out the value of their jewelry.I think this wave, what it’s doing is making people more and more informed that there is an asset class, which is gold, and they’re getting more familiar with it.Now, price action goes in both ways, so it can also go down in the future. I’m not saying it will, but it could happen. So I think customers will just have Unvault as a way to know what happens to their assets in an upmarket or a downmarket.
Photo: Courtesy of Unvault
What are your thoughts on the jewelry resale market and how it’s evolving?I think it needs a change. It’s not the financial infrastructure that an asset class deserves. We are tracking our Bitcoin in three different apps, […] and we have no way of finding out what’s the value of this gold. So I truly think that we deserve at least one thing for jewelry, for gold, which is billions and billions of dollars of assets in the U.S. So it is outdated, it’s archaic, it does not work, it is predatory.I think women deserve this change because at the end of the day, who suffers? It’s us who suffer.Looking ahead, what are some of your future goals for Unvault?Big picture goal for Unvault is creating a trillion-dollar asset class in the U.S. We want everything that’s personal gold, which is around a trillion dollars, to be tracked on [the] platform. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.Fashionista’s audience includes 1 million site visitors, 110,000 newsletter subscribers and 4.74 million social media followers. Want to know how to reach them? Learn more.
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