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)

Kailash Babar & Sagar Malviya, Economic Times

Mumbai, 23 February 2024

Tata Group and Reliance Industries, two of India’s largest conglomerates, are vying for premium retail real estate in Mumbai as they extend their footprints, creating rivalry in a city starved of marquee properties. From Zara and Starbucks to Westside and Titan, the Tata Group occupies nearly 25 million square feet of retail space in India. That is still no match for Reliance Industries that control three times more at 73 million sq ft for more than 100 local and global brands.

But in Mumbai, they are evenly matched, having nearly 3 million sq ft of retail space each. That is a quarter of what is considered the most prime retail real estate in the country, and both the retail giants are looking for more.

“In a modern retail environment, most visible locations contain more successful or larger brands. It just so happens that many of those brands are owned by either Reliance or the Tatas,” said Devangshu Dutta, founder of Third Eyesight, a strategy consulting firm.

“Tatas have been in retail for longer but also slower to scale up compared to Reliance which had this stated ambition of being the most dominant and put the money behind it,” he said.

In a market where demand is much higher than supply, developers and landlords seek to separate the wheat from the chaff, experts said. Ultimately, success in Mumbai’s retail real estate scene hinges on a delicate equilibrium between accommodating industry leaders and fostering a vibrant, varied shopping environment, they said. “In the competitive landscape of retail real estate in Mumbai, commercial developers and mall owners often face the strategic challenge of accommodating prominent retail brands,” said Abhishek Sharma, director, retail, at commercial real estate consultants Knight Frank India.

“These big brands, with a significant market share of 40-45% in the Indian retail sector, can easily be termed as industry giants and possess the potential to command 45-50% of space in any mall,” he said. According to Sharma, there may be perceptions of preferential treatments, but the dynamics are complex, and developers must balance the demand from these major brands with the need for a diverse tenant mix.

Tata Group entered retail in the late 1980s, initially by opening Titan watch stores and a decade later by launching department store Westside. So far, it has about 4,600 stores, including brands such as Tanishq, Starbucks, Westside, Zudio, Zara and Croma.

While Reliance Retail started in 2006, it overcompensated for its late entry by aggressively opening stores across formats. Reliance has over 18,774 stores across supermarkets, electronics, jewellery, and apparel space. It has also either partnered or acquired over 80 global brands, from Gap and Superdry to Balenciaga and Jimmy Choo. A diverse portfolio of brands across various segments through strategic partnerships and collaborations helps an entity like Reliance to leverage synergies and enhance retail presence, especially in malls, experts said.

“The array of brands with Reliance bouquet allows it to enter early into the project and set the tone and positioning of the mall,” said a retail leasing expert who requested not to be identified.

“This positively helps the mall to set its own positioning and future tenant mix. It also helps Reliance place their brands in most relevant zones within the mall. This will emerge as a clear differentiator in a city like Mumbai where brands are already jostling for space, which is the costliest in the country,” the person added.

(Published in Economic Times)