Gaurav Singh Kushwaha is a jeweller who never trained as one. Before BlueStone he was an engineer, an IIT Delhi graduate who had worked at Amazon. He did not come from the jewellery trade, he came from the internet. In an industry run by family firms with generations of ledgers, that was the first strike against him.
The sources are thin on the rest of his past. His birthplace and the story of his upbringing did not turn up, and I will not guess at them. What is documented is the choice. In 2011 he and co-founder Vidya Nataraj started BlueStone in Bengaluru as an online jeweller, at a time when Indians bought gold in person, from a man they knew, often for a wedding.
His birthplace and the story of his upbringing did not turn up, and I will not guess at them.
That bet looked wrong for years. Jewellery is a trust purchase. You want to hold it, weigh it, argue about it. A website could show a ring, but it could not give a customer that comfort. What almost nobody expected was how BlueStone would answer: not by abandoning the internet, but by walking into the real world on its own terms. It built stores, many of them, and by FY25 about 93% of revenue came through the offline channel.
The price of that walk was steep. In FY25 the company grew revenue about 40% to roughly ₹1,770 crore, but its net loss climbed to about ₹221.8 crore from ₹142.2 crore a year earlier, a 56% rise, which the business press tied directly to the store push. Stores cost money long before they earn it.
Then came the market test. BlueStone opened its IPO on 11 August 2025 with the fresh issue trimmed 18% to ₹820 crore, a signal that investors wanted a lower price for the risk. The issue was priced at ₹517 a share. Kushwaha stayed the largest individual shareholder, at about 17.7%.
Reports since suggest the bet may be paying off: FY26 operating revenue of about ₹2,441 crore and what one outlet called a first full year of profit, though accounts differ on the size of it.
For a founder reading this, the useful point is how Kushwaha handled being an outsider. He did not pretend to know the trade. He used the internet to learn what customers wanted, and then went where they were. Being the outsider cost him a decade of losses. It also meant he was never defending an old way of doing things.