Founder, Melorra | Founded 2016 | Bengaluru
An advertising start and a jewellery education
Saroja Yeramilli’s working life began in advertising. XIM University lists her among its alumni from the batch of 1991, and by her own account to Entrepreneur India she spent her first three years at advertising agencies before moving to Titan Industries as an advertising manager.
At Titan she crossed over from advertising into sales, and then into the business that would shape the rest of her career: jewellery. She went on to lead sales and marketing for Tanishq, Titan’s jewellery brand, during the years it was being turned around. Melorra’s own team page credits her with helping to make Tanishq an aspirational brand, launching Tanishq stores in the United States and introducing work-wear jewellery to the Indian market for the first time. BW Disrupt, profiling her in 2016, put her experience at about 25 years across Titan, Marico and Dell.
It was not a straight line. “I have taken three breaks, three sabbaticals,” she told Entrepreneur India in 2020, adding that she had never worried about getting back to work afterwards. She described herself as an “accidental entrepreneur.”
The jewellery that stayed in the locker
The idea behind Melorra came from a gap she had felt herself. As a younger woman, she said, she could not find jewellery she actually wanted to wear; the established brands seemed to make mostly traditional pieces. “I really felt that younger women’s needs weren’t being met by the traditional jewellery industry,” she told Entrepreneur India.
BW Disrupt described the mismatch she saw in urban India. Around 80% of these women’s wardrobes had become Western, while their jewellery was still heavy, traditional and designed for weddings and festivals. Much of it stayed locked away. Her years at Tanishq had shown her how the industry worked; the wardrobes showed her who it was leaving out.
Her answer was light, fashionable gold that a woman could wear to work on an ordinary day, sold online and designed to keep up with what she was already wearing.
Raising more than she asked for
Melorra was set up in Bengaluru and launched in January 2016, according to BW Disrupt; Inc42 dates the company’s founding to 2015. Going from idea to seed funding took three to four months.
She had expected to need about $2 million. Lightbox Ventures, the first venture capital firm she met, told her that was too little, and Melorra raised a $5 million seed round instead. “I kind of lucked out in meeting one of the best VCs in India in the very first attempt,” she said. Business Today later described it as India’s largest seed round of its time.
The early decisions were about building a brand rather than a marketplace. “We are not a jewellery market place, our designs are own and launched under the brand of Melorra,” she told BW Disrupt. The app was designed by Hrush Bhatt, a co-founder of Cleartrip, and the website carried a magazine-style “style feed” with a buy button.
Made after the order, launched every Friday
Melorra hired an international quality expert, set up a design studio and wrote a design philosophy document to guide every collection. Experienced jewellery designers often did not fit the brief, so the company hired from design colleges and trained interns for six months. Its designers looked “not to temples and traditional buildings for inspiration but to the Fashion Weeks at Paris and Milan,” she said in 2016.
The operating model was as unusual as the designs. Melorra held no inventory: every piece was made after a customer ordered it, using 3D printing and casting. It launched at least 75 new designs every Friday, and each collection took about 40 days from sketch to launch. In 2016, prices ranged from ₹3,000 to ₹1 lakh, with the average order at ₹18,000 to ₹20,000.
Customers came back faster than she had expected. She had assumed a woman might buy jewellery about once a year; within a few months of launch, returning customers were already in double digits as a share of buyers, she told BW Disrupt.
Growing fast, and going offline
In October 2019, Melorra raised $12 million from Lightbox, BlackSoil Capital and family offices including the Burman family of Dabur. By early 2020, Entrepreneur India reported, 75% of its customers were under 35 and 30% were under 25, it was delivering to more than 1,500 towns, and revenue had grown more than 500% in a year. Yeramilli set a public goal: “We feel that we want to be a billion dollar brand by FY26.”
The pandemic shut operations for about three months, but by November 2020 revenue was back to pre-pandemic levels, and average ticket sizes had risen 50–60%, she told Business Today. In December 2020 Melorra opened its first physical store, in Bengaluru.
By September 2021 the company had six experience centres, was delivering to more than 2,600 towns and had plans for 350 centres. “We are like the Zara of the jewellery industry,” she told Business Today. “At heart, we are a digital company.” Inc42 reported that Melorra raised about $72 million between 2019 and 2022, and that its last round, in mid-2022, valued it at about $120 million. In FY22 its sales grew to ₹364.4 crore, from ₹78.6 crore a year earlier.
The hard years
Growth came at a cost. Melorra’s losses in FY22 rose to ₹106.7 crore, Inc42 reported, and its advertising spend that year was about ₹120 crore. Stores changed the model: unlike made-to-order online sales, they needed jewellery on the shelf. According to a source quoted by Inc42, the store count reached 32 within three years, most of them opened in late 2022 and 2023.
In late 2023 a planned new funding round did not close. Inc42 reported layoffs, delayed salaries, store closures and customer complaints over unfulfilled orders and refunds, and said that by October 2024 the company owed about ₹100.5 crore to lenders, among them Oxyzo, the lending company co-founded by Ruchi Kalra. In June 2024 existing investors put in a $1.1 million bridge round at a fraction of the earlier valuation. Yeramilli declined to answer Inc42’s questions about the company’s situation at the time.
A new partner for Melorra
In April 2025, Senco Gold, the listed jewellery retailer, signed a master franchise agreement with August Jewellery, Melorra’s parent company, taking over the running of more than 20 Melorra stores, Angel One reported. Senco’s board later approved buying a 68% stake in August Jewellery for ₹68 crore, in tranches of fresh equity, with the money going towards growth and settling existing liabilities. Indian Retailer reported in October 2026 that the deal is expected to complete by February 2027, after which Senco and its promoter group would hold 79% and Melorra would become a Senco subsidiary. The same report put Melorra’s turnover at ₹33.25 crore in FY25 and ₹97.93 crore in FY26, with 20 stores across India.
The billion-dollar target did not happen, and the brand will soon sit inside a larger jeweller. But the insight Saroja Yeramilli built Melorra on has outlasted the turbulence: Indian women had not stopped wanting gold. They wanted gold that fitted the way they now dressed, worked and lived, and light, everyday jewellery has since become one of the most crowded and competitive corners of the market.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Sources: BW Disrupt (September 2016); Entrepreneur India (February 2020); Business Today (September 2021); Inc42 (October 2024); Angel One (April 2025); Indian Retailer (October 2026); XIM University alumni page; Melorra team page
