Mithun Sacheti's Rakesh Jhunjhunwala connection and his journey from Jaipur Gems to CaratLane
Mithun Sacheti founded online jewellery selling platform CaratLane in 2008 along with Srinivasa Gopalan. On Saturday, he scored one of the most successful exits by an Indian consumer internet entrepreneur when he sold his 27% stake to watchmaker Titan for Rs 4,621 crore. Sacheti, 44, first brought the Tata group company in as a shareholder in 2016, when an existing investor, New York-based investment fund Tiger Global, sold its 62% stake in CaratLane to Titan in a deal that valued the startup at Rs 536 crore.
On August 19, Titan ascribed a valuation of Rs 17,000 crore to the omnichannel retailer, an over 30-fold jump in seven years, reported ET. In an interview with ET, Sacheti, whose family runs Mumbai’s well-known jewellery store Jaipur Gems, asserted that his family stayed away from the media limelight as he quietly built the Chennai-based company. He further talked about the CaratLane journey and how Rakesh Jhunjhunwala backed him a lot.
While shedding light on his initial foray into the e-commerce business, Sacheti said that he didn’t realise the kind of money it would take to build an e-commerce business. " You’re sort of naive and do not realise what challenges will come forth. I had no reference point at all in India.
I was looking at Blue Nile in the US. My exposure levels were very low and I just knew the power of the internet as a user; I didn’t know it as a business builder. But in the first year, I realised I would need to stay in this business long," he told ET.
On his amazing journey from Jaipur Gems, a traditional jewellery store to building CaratLane, Sacheti said, «It was in 2008 that I started CaratLane. My background, my entire experience, was of running a family shop (Jaipur Gems). I was a
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