Startup Deep Dive : GIVA — the D2C jeweller that turned silver into a Rs 500 crore business while losing money every year

GIVA sold ₹518 crore ($54 million) worth of silver jewellery, lab-grown diamonds and light-weight gold in the year ending March 2025, up 89% from the year before, as per the company’s regulatory filings reviewed by Entrackr. It also lost ₹72 crore doing it, 22% more than the year before that.

In a country where “jewellery” has meant gold for three generations, a six-year-old Bengaluru brand has built a business investors now value at somewhere between ₹3,950 crore and ₹4,900 crore ($465-545 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) by selling the metal everyone else treated as an afterthought. The contradiction sits at the centre of GIVA’s story: rapid, real revenue growth, funded almost entirely by outside capital, in a business that has never turned a profit.

Quick facts

What they do

GIVA makes and sells fine jewellery built around 925 sterling silver, lab-grown diamonds and 14K/18K gold, priced mostly between a few hundred rupees and about ₹30,000 a piece, aimed at buyers who want jewellery for everyday wear and gifting rather than a once-in-a-lifetime wedding purchase. It sells through its own website and app, on Amazon, Flipkart and quick-commerce platforms, and through a fast-growing network of company-owned and franchise stores that crossed 200 outlets and was approaching 300 by the end of FY25, according to Entrackr’s review of its filings. Every piece ships with a purity certificate and a plating warranty, the kind of assurance that branded gold jewellers such as Tanishq have long offered but which barely existed in India’s silver trade.

The origin

Ishendra Agarwal, an IIT Kanpur engineering graduate who had worked in strategy consulting before an earlier attempt at a direct-to-consumer food venture, started GIVA in 2019 with Nikita Prasad and Sachin Shetty, as widely reported in founder interviews with YourStory and Entrepreneur India. Their insight was not about silver’s aesthetics; it was about the absence of a brand. India’s jewellery market was, and largely still is, split between organised gold retail worth tens of thousands of crore, run by names like Tanishq, Kalyan Jewellers and Malabar Gold, and an unorganised silver trade run out of neighbourhood shops. Agarwal put the problem bluntly in an interview with Business Today in February 2024: small shops were “doing their manmani”, selling whatever purity they felt like committing to, while the customer had no way to check and no recourse if it turned out to be less. Silver made up 12-13% of India’s roughly $100 billion jewellery market at the time, per the same report, and almost none of it carried a brand name a buyer could trust. GIVA’s founding bet was to bring the certification, design and retail discipline of organised gold jewellery to a metal nobody had bothered to organise.

The struggle years

The first hard test came within a year of launch. When India’s COVID-19 lockdown hit in March 2020, GIVA’s delivery network shut along with everything else classified as non-essential, and a company barely a year old with no offline stores to fall back on had, for a few weeks, no way to ship a single order. Agarwal later told YourStory that the business clawed back to pre-COVID sales levels within about 1.5 months of the lockdown lifting, helped by a broader shift of jewellery shopping online and by gold’s price spike pushing budget-conscious buyers toward silver.

The second, slower-burning struggle has been financial rather than operational: revenue has compounded fast, but so have losses, every single year since incorporation. GIVA’s net loss went from ₹19 crore on ₹84 crore of revenue in FY22, to ₹45 crore on ₹165 crore in FY23, to ₹59 crore on ₹274 crore in FY24, to ₹72 crore on ₹518 crore in FY25 — a company that has never come close to breaking even even as it multiplied its topline more than sixfold in three years, per Entrackr’s year-by-year filings review. Cash reserves fell too, from ₹83 crore at the end of FY24 to ₹37 crore at the end of FY25 even after a large primary funding round closed mid-year, a sign of how much capital an omnichannel jewellery build-out consumes. The third pressure point, still playing out, is a structural pivot: GIVA spent its first three years as a pure online D2C brand, then had to prove, starting with its first exclusive store in Bengaluru in 2022, that the same silver-and-trust proposition could work with the far higher fixed costs of physical retail — rent, staff and inventory sitting in glass cases rather than a warehouse.

The turning point

The event that changed GIVA’s trajectory was not a funding round or a celebrity deal; it was the first COVID-19 wave itself, in the financial year 2020-21. Before it, GIVA was a small online seller finding its feet, roughly a year into operations. As gold prices spiked and offline jewellery shops shut for months, a segment of buyers who wanted jewellery for gifting or self-purchase, but could not or would not pay gold prices, moved to organised silver instead. Agarwal has said sales grew 10X for the full year, with the last six months of FY21 running at close to 4.5 times pre-pandemic levels, as reported by YourStory in May 2021. That surge gave GIVA the growth curve and unit-level proof it needed to raise its first institutional capital, and by January 2022 it had closed a $10 million Series A round led by Sixth Sense Ventures and A91 Partners. A shock that emptied most retail stores in India ended up filling GIVA’s order book.

The money behind it

GIVA started on a shoestring: a seed round of about ₹75 lakh in August 2019, months after launch, from India Quotient and individual backers including Snapdeal’s Kunal Bahl, per startup-funding trackers. The real capital came later and in three broad steps. First, the $10 million Series A in January 2022, led by Sixth Sense Ventures and A91 Partners, earmarked for both online growth and GIVA’s first physical stores. Second, a Series B, led by Premji Invest with Alteria Capital participating, that funded the initial offline push past 80 stores. Third, and largest, a Series C of ₹450 crore ($53 million) in June 2025, led by Creaegis, with Premji Invest, Epiq Capital, Edelweiss Discovery Fund and the Usha Dalmia Trust participating, which Entrackr reported valued GIVA at about $465 million (₹3,950 crore) post-money. An extension to that round in early 2026, led by HPV CC1 with Premji Invest, Kenro Capital and Titan Capital, pushed the reported valuation up about 22% to roughly ₹4,900 crore ($545 million), according to D2C Insider Pulse. The two figures — ₹3,950 crore in mid-2025 and ₹4,900 crore some months later — are both “reported” rather than independently confirmed, since GIVA is privately held and does not disclose valuation itself; the gap simply reflects two different points in the same fundraising cycle. On cumulative funding, trackers disagree by a wide margin: Inc42 puts total capital raised at around $105 million as of mid-2025, while Tracxn’s tally runs closer to $160 million, a difference likely explained by debt facilities and smaller extension rounds that do not always make it into every database. What each round changed is clearer than the exact rupee count: Sixth Sense and A91 funded the leap from pure online to a national retail footprint; Premji Invest, which has now backed GIVA across at least three rounds, has stayed in as the anchor investor through its growth phase; and Creaegis’s 2025 cheque was explicitly earmarked for accelerating store openings and the lab-grown diamond and gold lines.

How it makes money

GIVA’s model is straightforward retail margin, not a marketplace or subscription business: it designs jewellery, gets it manufactured, and sells it directly at a markup over material and making cost, both online and through its own and franchised stores. Silver is the volume driver and the trust-builder — cheap enough that a first-time buyer takes a chance on the brand’s certification promise — while lab-grown diamonds and 14K-18K gold are the margin expanders, priced far below natural-diamond or 22K-gold jewellery but carrying gross margins Inc42 has reported at roughly 30-40%, comparable to mined-diamond jewellery. Lab-grown diamond products alone generated about ₹100 crore, roughly a fifth of GIVA’s FY25 revenue, per Inc42’s June 2025 reporting. The part buyers and observers most often get wrong is treating GIVA as an online-first business that happens to have some stores: by FY25 its revenue split was roughly 50:50 between online and offline channels, and the offline side is now the more capital-hungry growth engine, with new stores reportedly reaching profitability within three to four months of opening, per the same reporting. Costs run in the usual retail order — cost of materials (metal and stones) is the largest single expense at ₹227 crore in FY25, followed by marketing at ₹135 crore, employee costs at ₹91 crore, and rent, which surged 135% to ₹47 crore as the store count expanded, according to Entrackr’s filings review. A loyalty programme, GIVA Crown, and a large repeat-customer base — repeat orders made up 35-40% of sales and that revenue line grew 2.5 times in FY25, per Inc42 — are what let the brand spend heavily on new-customer marketing without every sale needing to justify its acquisition cost on its own.

The numbers

Figures below are from GIVA’s financial filings as reported by Entrackr; all amounts in ₹ crore, revenue from operations and standalone/consolidated net loss for the fiscal year ending 31 March.

Two things stand out. Revenue has grown between 66% and 96% every year for four straight years, a pace few Indian D2C brands sustain this long. But the loss has grown in every one of those years too, and GIVA’s own cost ratios show why: it spent ₹1.28 to earn every ₹1 of revenue in FY23, improving only to ₹1.15 by FY25, per Entrackr’s analysis of the filings. Return on capital employed was a negative 48% in FY23 and still a negative 21.5% in FY25 — better, but still deeply negative for a business that has now been operating for six years.

Where the money comes from

The clearest split in GIVA’s business is channel, not geography: online and offline each contributed roughly half of FY25 revenue, a genuine 50:50 balance that most Indian D2C-origin brands, still leaning heavily online, have not reached. Within offline, GIVA’s stores are concentrated in India’s largest eight cities with a deliberate push into Tier II towns, and the company has said it uses its online purchase data — where its website customers already live — to pick new store locations, often next to fashion retailers such as H&M and Zara rather than inside traditional jewellery bazaars, according to Inc42’s June 2025 reporting. The surprise is what is quietly becoming a second growth line within the product mix: lab-grown diamonds, a category that barely existed for GIVA a few years ago, already accounted for roughly a fifth of FY25 revenue. A small but notable geographic footnote is Sri Lanka, which contributed ₹10.7 crore in FY25, GIVA’s first meaningfully reported international revenue, per Entrackr’s filings review — a sign the brand is starting to test demand outside India even while the domestic story is still the main event.

The risks

The most immediate risk sits in GIVA’s raw material itself. Silver has moved from around ₹80,000 a kilogram to well over ₹3 lakh at points through 2025 and 2026, with daily swings of up to 20%, and a brand whose core promise to a price-sensitive, largely Gen Z customer base is affordability cannot pass on every price spike without breaking that promise — leaving margin compression as the likely outcome whenever hedging falls short or retail prices hit a psychological ceiling. Second is a genuinely disclosed financial risk: GIVA’s own filings show cash and bank balances falling from ₹83 crore to ₹37 crore between FY24 and FY25 even as losses kept widening, meaning the company remains dependent on further external fundraising to keep opening stores and absorbing losses, a dependency that becomes more expensive with every round if growth does not eventually translate into narrower losses. Third is competitive and structural: GIVA holds an estimated 1.5% share of India’s organised studded-jewellery market, against roughly 5% for Titan-owned CaratLane, according to Inc42’s competitive analysis, and it now competes not just with unbranded local silver shops but with much larger, better-capitalised gold-and-diamond retailers moving into lighter-weight, lower-price categories, plus fellow D2C entrants such as BlueStone, which has itself filed to go public. A fourth, more speculative risk worth naming: lab-grown diamonds, one of GIVA’s two margin engines, saw a boom-then-price-crash cycle in the United States as manufactured supply caught up with demand; if the same oversupply dynamic plays out in India, a category contributing a fifth of GIVA’s revenue could see both volumes and per-carat prices come under pressure at the same time.

The takeaway

GIVA’s lesson is not really about jewellery. It is about what happens when a market has a large, underserved segment that incumbents have simply never bothered to organise — not because the segment is small (silver alone is a chunk of a $100 billion market) but because the customer was assumed to be too price-sensitive to be worth a real brand. GIVA’s founders bet that trust, not just price, was the missing product in Indian silver retail, and four years of accelerating revenue suggest they read that gap correctly. What the same four years also show, unsentimentally, is that being right about a market gap and being profitable in it are two different problems: strong top-line growth, if it is bought with proportionally larger losses every year, is a story about capital efficiency still waiting to be told, not a story that ends when the growth chart looks impressive.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded GIVA and when?

GIVA was founded in 2019 in Bengaluru by Ishendra Agarwal, who serves as founder and CEO, along with co-founders Nikita Prasad and Sachin Shetty.

What is GIVA’s latest valuation?

GIVA was valued at about ₹3,950 crore ($465 million) after its Series C round in June 2025, led by Creaegis, and this was reported to have risen to roughly ₹4,900 crore ($545 million) after an extension round by around February 2026, per Entrackr and D2C Insider Pulse respectively. Both figures are as reported by investors and media, since GIVA is privately held.

Is GIVA profitable?

No. GIVA has posted a net loss every year on record: ₹19 crore in FY22, ₹45 crore in FY23, ₹59 crore in FY24 and ₹72 crore in FY25, even as revenue grew from ₹84 crore to ₹518 crore over the same period, according to Entrackr’s review of its filings.

What does GIVA actually sell?

GIVA sells 925 sterling silver jewellery, lab-grown diamond jewellery and lighter-weight 14K/18K gold pieces, positioned as affordable, certified, everyday and gifting jewellery rather than heavy traditional or bridal gold jewellery.

Is GIVA planning an IPO?

GIVA had not filed for a public listing as of September 2026 and remains privately held, backed by investors including Premji Invest, Creaegis, A91 Partners, Epiq Capital and Edelweiss Discovery Fund; competitor BlueStone has moved further along the IPO path in the same period.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, “Giva reports Rs 165 Cr revenue in FY23; losses surge 2.4X”, November 2023
• Entrackr, “Giva’s revenue spikes 66% to Rs 274 Cr revenue in FY24”, 14 November 2024
• Entrackr, “GIVA’s revenue jumps 89% to Rs 518 Cr in FY25”, 13 February 2026
• Entrackr, “GIVA to raise $53 Mn led by Creaegis at $465 Mn valuation”, June 2025
• D2C Insider Pulse, “GIVA Raises $12 Mn in Series C Extension, Valuation Climbs to ₹4,900 Cr”, February 2026
• Inc42, “How GIVA Crafted An INR 500 Cr+ Brand On Silver Jewellery And Lab-Grown Diamonds”, 12 June 2025
• Inc42, “GIVA FY25: Loss Widens 23% To ₹72 Cr, Revenue Jumps 90%”, February 2026
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] Silver jewellery startup GIVA raises $10M from Sixth Sense Ventures, A91 Partners”, January 2022
• YourStory, “Why this engineer decided to launch D2C silver jewellery startup GIVA”, May 2021
• Business Today, “‘Small shops doing manmani’: Why jewellery start up GIVA picked silver as core segment”, 19 February 2024

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