How this jeweller is using digital tech to bring bespoke back to jewellery

Angara, the US-based fine jewellery brand known for its deep personalisation and coloured gemstone expertise, entered the Indian market in June this year. 

Ankur Daga, co-founder of Angara, shared with TechCircle how the brand is using artificial intelligence and vertical integration to bring back hyper-personalisation customisation in jewellery for the digital age.

A Legacy that started centuries ago

“We often say that we are half tech and half jewellery,” said Daga. “Aditi’s (Angara’s co-founder) family has been in the jewellery business for over 300 years, while mine has been working with gemstones for more than 50 years. We both grew up surrounded by jewellery, even though we later spent time in the corporate world, my own stint at McKinsey even included a project with Tanishq, which gave me deeper insights into the industry.”

Daga, a Wharton School and Harvard Business School alum, worked with auditing firm McKinsey for two years before co-founding Angara in 2005.

A goal to blend heritage and contemporary experience led to the creation of Angara, which aims to bring back the original essence of jewellery buying.

“If you rewind 300 years, the experience was deeply personal. A jeweller would visit the customer, often royalty, and the design process would begin with a conversation. The Maharani (Queen) might describe her dream piece, the jeweller would sketch it, source the gems, and handcraft it over months. That level of intimacy, meaning, and collaboration has been lost in the mass-market retail experience of today.”

Angara was born out of a desire to use technology to restore that meaningful jewellery-buying experience.

“Today, when you walk into most retail stores, you’re expected to choose from what's available, rather than start with what you truly want. That didn’t sit right with us,” the co-founder said. “We believed technology could enable a return to bespoke jewellery, where every piece is made for an individual, not mass-produced.”

That goal led Angara to create a digital-first, highly customised platform. Customers can design their own pieces by choosing from metals (silver, gold, rose gold, platinum), carat sizes (from 0.5 to 4), and quality ranges (from accessible to Tiffany-grade), and several other parameters. Technology plays a big role in ensuring this level of customisation, he notes.

The 1.0, 2.0, and now the 3.0 Vision

Daga explained that Angara’s journey so far has been defined by three clear phases. Version 1.0 was focused on promoting coloured gemstones, an effort to return to the era before diamonds became dominant, thanks to Diamond seller De Beers’ marketing campaigns.

Version 2.0 introduced speed and personalisation at scale. As the website became faster, the permutations increased (128+ combinations), and real-time visual rendering helped customers see near-life representations of what they were designing. “Getting gemstone colours and tones to appear accurately across different screens, MacBooks or Microsoft computers, was a huge technical challenge, but we’ve now reached a 99.9% accuracy level,” he said.

Now, Angara is working on its 3.0 version. “We’re developing a new experience powered by AI and Machine Learning (ML), combined with our deep jewellery expertise. The idea is to remove all the traditional boundaries. Guardrails will exist only where product feasibility or design harmony is in question. But the final say will always be with the customer.”

Customisation at scale, powered by AI

A big part of Angara’s differentiation lies in its AI-driven personalisation engine. The system learns from a customer’s past behaviour to simplify future experiences by pre-selecting preferences, re-merchandising catalogue pages, and offering smarter recommendations.

Their upcoming AI Ring Designer will allow customers to design a bespoke ring using just a story prompt like “a ring inspired by the night sky in Jaipur” or “based on our shared love for music and the ocean.” Angara is experimenting with generative tools like Midjourney as the underlying model. 

“We don’t allow customers to reference brand names in their design requests. Even if something resembles another brand’s IP, our merchandising team intervenes. We’ve built in a strong filter to ensure nothing infringes.”

Angara is also exploring a royalty model where customer-created designs that are scalable (and approved) could be monetised, with royalties paid back to the customer. “We’re still brainstorming that but are aiming for a rollout by the end of the year.”

Notably, a recent report by HTF Market Intelligence, the global AI-designed jewellery market is projected to grow from $1.4 billion in 2024 to $5.6 billion by 2032, at a CAGR of 18.90% from 2025 to 2032.

Angara’s in-house tech team

Angara’s tech team is 25 people strong, all based in Jaipur. “We have built everything in-house on a microservices architecture. The flexibility that our business demands, especially at the level of customisation we offer, simply isn’t possible using pre-existing platforms like Shopify.”

That complexity does bring challenges. “Speed is critical, especially since we’re vertically integrated and committed to fast delivery. But maintaining that velocity while offering deep customisation, through microservices, requires constant balance.”

Angara controls the entire value chain—from sourcing rough gemstones from Africa, Australia, and Asia to in-house design, manufacturing, and online retail. “This vertical integration helps us deliver fast—once an order is placed, it is custom-built, manufactured within 24-48 hours, and shipped globally.”

Inventory turnover, especially in the US, is five times faster than average. “That’s because our predictive analytics tools, also homegrown, can predict demand in real time. It’s a tight feedback loop between consumer behaviour, tech, and supply chain.”

Cracking the Indian market: A new playbook

India, despite being a massive jewellery market, requires a different approach.

“The Indian customer is very detail-oriented. The price breakdown must show the gold weight, labour charges, and gemstone weight. That led us to build a new pricing engine and display format specifically for India.”

Angara is also planning to go omnichannel in India. “We’ll launch our first four physical stores in Q1 2026 across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, and Jaipur. But even with that, Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will remain critical. We allow users to upload their photos and visualise custom jewellery on themselves. For a bespoke brand like ours, realism in virtual try-ons is essential.”

With 250 people in Jaipur, a compact but innovative tech team, and plans for both physical and virtual expansion, Angara is betting big on India, said Daga.

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