ONYA raises Rs 12.5 crore for lab-grown retail

ONYA, a lab-grown diamond jewellery brand founded in 2024, has raised Rs 12.5 crore in a pre-Series A round led by Divisa Family Office. Existing investor Zeropearl VC doubled down. The round follows an initial Rs 5.5 crore seed, and the source places the MyGate founders and the UrbanVault founder in that earlier seed rather than in this round.

The brand says the money goes four ways: accelerating its retail footprint, funding digital customer acquisition, building online personalisation, and deepening research into product design and manufacturing. That is four separate cost centres for one Rs 12.5 crore cheque, and the split between them is not disclosed.

ONYA is Bengaluru based, co-founded by Gaurav Choudhary and Himani Yadav. It reports eight flagship stores, on high streets in Bengaluru, at Amanora Gold Souk Mall in Pune and in Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad, plus what it calls Rs 3.5 crore of monthly recurring revenue. Divide the second figure by the first and you get roughly Rs 44 lakh a month per store. ONYA does not split online from offline, so treat that as a blended average and not a store number.

The positioning is a trust stack rather than a discount. IGI certified stones set in BIS hallmarked gold, a patented setting of its own, and a lifetime exchange and buyback promise, at what the brand puts at about 20 percent of the cost of natural diamonds. Each of those claims has to be serviced in every channel it opens, which is why the four way split matters more than the headline number.

Not disclosed: valuation, post round ownership, a target store count, any timeline, and whether ONYA sells on marketplaces at all. Expansion is stated as company owned stores plus franchises, with no numbers attached.

For category context, Entrackr reports nine pure-play lab-grown diamond startups raised $26.4 million in 2025, up from $4.7 million in 2024. Recent rounds include Aukera at Rs 90 crore of debt in July, after a $15 million equity round led by Peak XV Partners, Limelight Lab Grown Diamonds at Rs 275 crore, and GIVA at Rs 530 crore in Series C for its Heer brand. ONYA is raising into a funded field at a fraction of those cheque sizes, so revenue per store is the number to watch here, not store count.