India’s lab-grown dia­monds sparkle as investors rush in

Priyam­vada C, Mint
1 Dec 2025

A wave of investor cap­ital is flow­ing into India’s labor­at­ory-grown dia­mond (LGD) seg­ment, as fast­s­cal­ing brands tap rising con­sumer adop­tion in a mar­ket now worth well over $300 mil­lion. New-age brands have raised mul­tiple rounds of cap­ital on the back of grow­ing mar­ket share and improv­ing mar­gins.

Actor Shilpa Shetty-backed Lime­light, which is in talks to raise its second round of cap­ital this year, joins the grow­ing list of other small brands such as Onya, Giva, Jew­el­box, Lucira Jew­ellery and Aukera, among oth­ers, who have snagged mon­ies in recent months. Lime­light has appoin­ted Ambit Cap­ital to raise about $20 mil­lion to fund its expan­sion plans, two people famil­iar with the mat­ter said.

Con­firm­ing the fun­draise, the six year-old com­pany’s co-founder Pooja Madhavan said the funds will be used towards store expan­sion and brand build­ing as it looks to touch 100 stores over the next year. “We are in final talks with growth PE funds and reputed fam­ily offices (for the fun­draise),” she told Mint.

Other sim­ilar fun­draises include Onya’s ₹5.5 crore in a pre-seed round led by Zeropearl VC last week, Aukera’s $15 mil­lion raise led by Peak XV Part­ners and Aditya Birla Ven­tures-backed Giva raised ₹530 crore in an internal round led by Premji Invest, Epiq Cap­ital and Edel­weiss Dis­cov­ery Fund, as it looks to scale up its lab-grown dia­mond offer­ings.

Nine pure-play lab grown dia­mond star­tups col­lect­ively raised a record $26.4 mil­lion in 2025, com­pared with $4.7 mil­lion across eight star­tups last year, data from mar­ket intel­li­gence pro­vider Tracxn showed.

The devel­op­ment comes as India’s lab-grown dia­mond jew­ellery mar­ket, val­ued at about $300-350 mil­lion in 2024, expects to grow at a com­pound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15% over the next dec­ade, as per con­sultancy firm Red­seer’s estim­ates. As the mar­ket evolves, sev­eral prom­in­ent jew­ellery brands will gradu­ally pivot from exclus­ively nat­ural/mined dia­monds in favour of lab-grown altern­at­ives, along­side high-end jew­ellers incor­por­at­ing the lab-growns into their select col­lec­tions, which will drive sales volumes and act as an afford­able entry point for con­sumers.

This seg­ment has par­tic­u­larly picked pace in the last five years, with mil­len­ni­als and gen Z lead­ing this shift, driven by bet­ter value, trend­ier designs from new-age brands, and grow­ing com­fort with lab-grown dia­monds as a cer­ti­fied, high-qual­ity product. This cat­egory has also widened bey­ond occa­sional fash­ion to gift­ing, daily wear and increas­ingly bridal, reflect­ing sus­tained con­sumer con­fid­ence and a will­ing­ness to treat them as a main­stream jew­ellery option, Rohan Agar­wal, part­ner at Red­seer told Mint in an emailed state­ment.

He fur­ther added that new-age brands have stead­ily gained mar­ket share in the mid-ticket gift­ing and daily wear seg­ment with many try­ing to push into premium ranges. While the com­pet­it­ive land­scape is still evolving, incum­bents have already star­ted respond­ing by launch­ing LGD lines of their own, although the extent to which they can chal­lenge remains to be seen.

Major Indian brands that are con­sid­er­ing a foray into this cat­egory include Malabar Gold & Dia­monds, Senco Gold, which has launched the sub­brand Sennes and Tata’s Trent, which launched its brand Pome in West­side stores.

Devangshu Dutta, founder and chief exec­ut­ive officer at Delhi-based con­sult­ing firm Third Eye­sight, echoed the sen­ti­ment. He explained that new-age lab grown dia­mond play­ers are for­cing tra­di­tional jew­ellers to intro­duce LGD options or risk los­ing younger cus­tom­ers. “Not just pre­cious jew­ellery brands, even those that star­ted as fash­ion jew­ellery are expand­ing their range with LGD designs.”

“Down the road, there is poten­tially scope for con­sol­id­a­tion as investors tend to prefer a hand­ful of scaled plat­forms with strong brand recall and robust eco­nom­ics. So, as the cat­egory matures, there may be stra­tegic acquis­i­tions by large jew­ellery houses and cor­por­ates, as well as mer­gers among fun­ded star­tups,” he added.

Those star­tups that can com­bine in-house man­u­fac­tur­ing, design cap­ab­il­it­ies and data-driven retail expan­sion would be at an advant­age, Dutta said. “Key future growth areas for LGD star­tups include omni­chan­nel retail pres­ence within India, with off­line stores espe­cially in demand-dense loc­a­tions such as the met­ros and Tier 1 cit­ies, export mar­kets both with poten­tial cost advant­ages and brand expan­sion, and extend­ing into fash­ion jew­ellery, every­day wear, col­oured lab grown stones and even lux­ury col­lab­or­a­tions that pos­i­tion lab grown as aspir­a­tional rather than merely budget friendly.”

(Published in Mint)