Investment led by The Chennai Angels’ Kayar Raghavan, Lakshmi Potluri and angel investors Jacob Kurian, Jerry Rao, Arihant Patni.
The Chennai Angels (TCA) announced an investment in Velvetcase.com, founded in 2012 by Kapil Hetamsaria and Runit Shah, is a Mumbai based company in the luxury e-commerce segment. This round of investment was led by TCA investors Kayar Raghavan and Lakshmi Potluri among other prominent business professionals and angel investors including Jacob Kurian, Jerry Rao and Arihant Patni.
The entrepreneurs have a strong background in diamond jewellery manufacturing and technology segments, combined with several years of experience at leading global companies including McKinsey & Co., Microsoft, Dell, General Motors. Velvetcase is a global online platform for custom and designer jewellery. It partners with designers from across the world and brings the best design variety to consumers across the world.
The team has built a disruptive supply chain model by leveraging cutting edge technology like 3D printers and process innovations in jewellery manufacturing. The innovative model adopted by Velvetcase.com has already found its way in a case study written by Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and recently published by Harvard Business Publishing – probably the first time an Indian company has been covered by Harvard Business Publishing this early in its evolution.
“Velvetcase was a compelling proposition on several counts but what tipped it for me were the founders’ enterprise and infectious passion and the firm’s unique business model of presenting a globally crowdsourced but classily curated jewellery design,” said Kayar Raghavan from The Chennai Angels.
“Velvetcase integrates technology, bringing global jewellery designers onto a single platform with a focus on today’s customer. Such an online model particularly in this vertical (which I believe has tremendous potential given the current consumer shifts toward modern format/organized retailing), brings wide variety of designs together with supply chain efficiency that creates incredible value proposition for consumers” said Lakshmi Potluri from The Chennai Angels.
“This is a first of its kind initiative and we are very excited to have a strong set of investors across India and US as part of the team” said Kapil Hetamsaria from Velvetcase.