What if what’s sitting in your jewelry drawer is worth more than you think?
New data shows Americans are unknowingly sitting on big money when it comes to gold jewelry. And now artificial intelligence is getting trained to make it possible to find out what it’s worth in minutes.
How much is your jewelry really worth?
“People have jewelry that sits in their drawers,” said Nidhi Singhvi, the founder of Unvault, an AI-powered financial platform that helps people value, track and sell personal jewelry. “They have no idea. It’s completely idle, completely untracked, and all they want is to find out the value.”
Singhvi said that’s why she created Unvault. She says people can track their jewelry portfolios and discover real-time market values for free, removing the need for pawn shops.
“Once they know the value, then the decision-making is simple,” Singhvi said. “You can choose to keep it, you can choose to gift it, and you can choose to sell it. But I think where it starts is just understanding the value. It’s like any other asset class, right?”
It works by turning your pictures into volumetric data.
“We’ve trained it on a lot of jewelry data,” Singhvi said. “So we can come to a pretty good estimate of just the weight of gold, the carat of diamonds, gemstones that are used for every piece. And then we have built our pricing engine, which helps us give you a value for your jewelry.”
Testing the technology out
KDKA put it to the test, requesting feedback from Pittsburgh jeweler Yuriy Bekman, who owns Yuriy’s Jewelry and regularly buys people’s jewelry. Investigator Meghan Schiller uploaded pictures of her yellow gold ring with six small rubies. Unvault estimated she could sell it for a range between $302 and $391. But Bekman said no one would pay that much.
But what about a lot of gold? Beckman put down his Rolex Sky-Dweller. Unvault said he could sell it for anywhere between $16,000 and $21,000. But he said that’s too low.
“I think it’s like close to 30,000 just in scrap right now,” Beckman said.
But KDKA should note that we didn’t submit any authentication paperwork into the platform.
How selling your jewelry works
Singhvi says interested customers ship their jewelry to Unvault and they film the whole process.
“So from opening the package to the person putting it in the gold X-ray machine, to the person looking at the diamonds in the diamond tester, everything is on video,” Singhvi said.
She’s hoping to bring transparency to the process.
“We authenticate, we give you more information, and then we tell you if you want to accept the offer, you accept it, if not, we’ll send it back to you,” Singhvi said.
Singhvi says she’s just as much in the business of giving customers data as she is jewelry.
“It is good to know the value, it is good to track, and if you need money, or if you just don’t have any use of the jewelry, I think it’s a good idea to figure out if you want to liquidate it,” Singhvi said. “But again, gold is still doing very well. I don’t think you’ve lost a window or anything like that.”
Gold prices have surged more than 16 times since 2000.
Beckman said he remembers a time when customers lined up down Smithfield Street to get into his jewelry store and sell him their gold. He says people are still busy selling as of late, and the best items to score you some cash are heavy gold chains and big stones like rubies, sapphires, and opals.
