Glam and green: How this Shilpa Shetty-backed startup is making sustainable diamonds desirable
Mumbai-headquartered lab-grown diamond jewellery brand Limelight is bringing conscious craftsmanship and sustainable sparkle to India’s luxury landscape.
In India, diamonds have long been synonymous with status and permanence. But Mumbai-based Limelight Lab-Grown Diamonds is challenging tradition with a bold idea: What if luxury could shine without leaving a mark on the planet?
Founded in 2019 by Pooja Madhavan, a former investment banker turned entrepreneur, Limelight is part of a quiet but powerful movement changing how India thinks about diamonds. With over 50 stores across 45 cities, Limelight is now India’s largest lab-grown diamond jewellery brand—and one of the few aiming to make sustainable luxury mainstream.
Before entering the world of diamonds, Madhavan followed a very different path. A graduate of the London School of Economics, she spent nearly a decade in finance at Barclays, London. “I wasn’t from the diamond or jewellery industry,” she says. “But being Gujarati, I always wanted to start my own venture.” In 2016–17, she returned to India to pursue that dream.
Her journey led her to Surat, where she met Bakul Limbasiya, a leading producer of lab-grown diamonds. A visit to his facility proved transformative, with the scale of technology convincing her that India, long known for polishing the world’s diamonds, could now produce them too.
Seeing the potential to merge style and sustainability, Madhavan founded Limelight in 2019 with her childhood friends and co-founders Kalpan Dalal and Nirav Bhatt. Their mission was singular: to make sustainable diamonds aspirational for the Indian consumer.
Breaking myths around ‘real’ diamonds
From the start, the biggest challenge was education. “There’s been a lot of misrepresentation,” Madhavan says. “People assumed that lab-grown meant fake. But both mined and lab-grown diamonds are made of carbon; they are chemically, physically, and optically identical.”
Madhavan explains that lab-grown diamonds are made by recreating the same high-pressure, high-temperature conditions under which real diamonds form. The result is Type IIa diamonds, the purest and rarest kind, found in only 2% of mined stones. “They have exceptional shine and brilliance, so consumers actually receive a superior product,” she says.
Beyond purity and price, sustainability is at the heart of Limelight’s mission. Madhavan points out that traditional diamond mining comes at a steep environmental cost: extracting just one carat of diamond can displace around 250 tons of earth and emit 57 kg of carbon emissions. In 2023, around 111 million carats of diamonds were mined globally.
Limelight’s diamonds, grown in Surat using solar energy, offer a cleaner alternative. “We’re not manufacturing diamonds; we’re providing the environment for them to grow,” she says. “That’s why we call them green diamonds.”
In 2023, lab-grown diamonds gained national attention when Prime Minister Narendra Modi gifted one to US First Lady Jill Biden, calling it a “green diamond”.
Using technology for personalisation
Limelight’s operations are data-driven and use an in-house retail management platform that tracks inventory and sales across all stores while studying regional customer preferences.
The startup has adopted AI to speed up custom designs and product development. “We use open-source AI to create new designs and personalise faster,” Madhavan says. “The future of luxury is in customisation, not just rarity.”
Limelight offers over 8,000 solitaire-based designs, priced between Rs 6,000 and Rs 12 lakh, including rings, earrings, necklaces, and pendants.
Its latest launch and flagship product, Navarambh, is a bridal gift box with seven versatile pieces priced between Rs 6 lakh and Rs 10 lakh. “Young brides don’t want heavy jewellery that is locked away,” Madhavan says. “They want pieces they can wear for different occasions.”
In FY25, Limelight reported Rs 126 crore in revenue. The startup has raised $11 million from institutional investors and family offices, with actor Shilpa Shetty coming on board as an investor and brand ambassador.
“I chose to associate with Limelight because the brand aligns perfectly with my belief in mindful, future-forward choices. As both an investor and ambassador, I see lab-grown diamonds as a powerful shift in how India experiences luxury: beautiful, ethical, and accessible. Limelight is making conscious luxury aspirational for a new generation,” Shilpa Shetty says.
“She (Shetty) strongly believes in the product and in what we’re building - a more sustainable alternative for modern consumers,” Madhavan says.
Business model and reach
Headquartered in Mumbai, Limelight follows a B2C and retail-partner model. Apart from its own stores, it has shop-in-shop counters within existing jewellery retailers, which allows customers access to its collections while helping traditional jewellers enter the lab-grown segment.
“We have around 85 points of sale across India,” Madhavan says. “Retailers sell lab-grown jewellery under Limelight’s name to keep their own brand separate.”
Limelight’s production takes place in Surat, through partnerships with the Emerald Group and Bakul Limbasia’s lab-grown diamond facility, which produces over five million carats a year. The startup employs around 350 people, including 170 at its Mumbai head office.
Market and the competition
According to the Future Market Insights report, the lab-grown diamond market in India was valued at $395 million in 2025 and is expected to grow to approximately $1.57 billion by 2035, registering a CAGR of 14.8%.
“We already command about 20% of the Indian market. We’re aiming to grow at 30% while maintaining steady expansion in the next year,” Madhavan says.
Despite strong competition from brands like Tanishq, Malabar, CaratLane, and BlueStone, the founder believes Limelight stands out with its exclusive focus on sustainable, solitaire-based jewellery.
Limelight has big plans for the future: to grow to 100 stores by 2026 and 300 by 2028, becoming India’s biggest lab-grown diamond jewellery brand. It is also adding more shop-in-shop counters with partner jewellers in multiple cities to reach more customers.
On the product side, the brand will soon launch a special curated collection with Shilpa Shetty and continue introducing new diamond cuts, like its recently unveiled half-moon solitaire. The brand also plans to make its jewellery more accessible through major ecommerce tie-ups, expected to go live in the next few months.
Limelight may have started as Madhavan's vision, but the brand is working to reshape India’s jewellery landscape with green diamonds that embody the evolution of Indian luxury.