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DIAMOND FOUNDRY SPENT the last three years quietly working on an ambitious project.
The US startup, created by Nanosolar founder Martin Roscheisen, wanted to grow “real” diamonds in a lab. Unlike synthetic diamonds, these would be hatched from a sliver of a natural, mined diamond as the substrate.
After two years of experiments with failed diamond-growing reactors, Roscheisen’s Santa Clara-based team says it cracked the code. Now the company claims to be able to grow hundreds of diamonds that are up to nine carats in just two weeks in a lab.
The breakthrough was enough to convince ten billionaires and members of Silicon Valley tech royalty to invest.
Diamond Foundry has closed three rounds of financing from individuals including actor Leonardo DiCaprio, Twitter/Medium founder Evan Williams, SUN Microsystems founder Andreas Bechtolsheim, Facebook cofounder Andrew McCollum, and many others.
DiCaprio starred in the movie Blood Diamond and has since taken on some related activism against the industry, which has been heavily criticised for its negative environmental impact and child labour.
Partners
The company says it has raised less than $100 million (€93 million) to date — which is significant considering the startup just publicly launched.
Roscheisen, the company’s CEO, was in the same PhD programme at Stanford as Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. While Diamond Foundry is making the diamonds, it isn’t designing jewellery.
Instead, it has a marketplace with about 200 partnering designers who buy the crystals from Diamond Foundry, put them in their rings, bracelets, and necklaces, then sell them straight to consumers online. The designer purchases are currently the startup’s only source of income.
By buying diamonds through Diamond Foundry, the designers can avoid giving a cut of the money to traditional outlets like De Beers or Tiffany’s. That doesn’t mean Diamond Foundry is selling its jewels at a discount though.
While synthetic diamonds tend to cost about 30% less than naturally made and mined diamonds, Diamond Foundry says its product will cost about the same, if not more, than market value.
But are Diamond Foundry and its science-fiction-sounding vision the real deal?
Here’s how the company explained it:
The startup says it is “culturing diamonds,” and asserts its process does not yield traditional synthetic diamonds but “100% pure diamonds” with the same molecular imperfections of the diamonds you’d find in the earth.
An investor in Diamond Foundry likened the process to growing a plant. You need a seed from another plant for a new one to grow.
In this case, a small slice of a natural diamond is used as the base, or “seed,” to grow new layers on top of the crystal until new diamonds are formed. Then that “seed” base is scraped off and reused to grow new diamonds.
These diamonds are grown in a very hot reactor that reaches about 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit (nearly 4,500 degrees Celsius).
Diamonds are born from a fiery heat, so we set out to create a plasma of unprecedented energy density,” the company explains.
A slice of diamond
The company says it discovered a plasma that allows atoms to attach themselves to the thin slice of earth-extracted diamond. The atoms then stack on top of that natural diamond, layer by layer, until a pure, jewellery-grade diamond is formed.
Hundreds of these diamonds can be formed at once in just a few weeks, the largest so far weighing nine carats.
The difference comes down to the quality of the diamonds Roscheisen’s lab produces and the process used to make them.
“There is a big difference in how the technology works,” a company spokesperson explains.
The difference is that we add atoms to natural diamonds, and in fact our process would not work without the natural diamond as a substrate. The synthetic diamonds in the market are made using high pressure without any substrate for growth.”
In terms of quality, diamonds are rated by something called the GIA, which examines colour, clarity, cut, and carat weight. The GIA rates synthetic diamonds, but it uses fewer grading categories in terms of their colour and clarity.
Diamond Foundry, however, says its diamonds were rated by a GIA-trained gemologist who concluded they were “true jewellery white.”
Diamond Foundry says that because the industry is so large (roughly €28 billion), even if it’s producing hundreds of diamonds routinely in its lab, it won’t be able to make enough of them to seriously impact the overall price and demand for diamonds.
Another selling point for the startup is that consumers won’t have to worry about how their diamonds were made.
“[Ours] are pure diamond, just like industrially mined diamonds,” Diamond Foundry insists. “But ethically and morally pure as well.”
By Alyson Shontell for Business Insider
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Growing diamonds, eh. Hopefully they’ll open shops beside the money tree.
I have some magic beans if anyone is interested
This would stop alot of African conflicts and wars and exploitation. I sincerely hope he succeeds, top bloke and a good man, and has a righteous outlook.
Well – his big ship sunk. You know where that wan was singing…
Anyone remember a book from National School called The Diamond Maker?
De Beers could have acted responsibly and much of the turmoil avoided.
Would go well with VS knickers
De Beers bought the copyright to artificial diamonds and holds the price of them up close to natural diamonds. Win-Win for them. i can only guess that they are behind the multi-billionaire backers for this endeavor and as a direct result, diamonds will continue to rise in price even though supply has massively increased and demand hasn’t.
@Cal Mooney
“De Beers bought the copyright to artificial diamonds” true, but this startup in making “real” diamonds & copying the way they are produced in nature. De Beers can’t copyright of buy a natural process would be like trying to copyright Rain.
All Leo’s films are great. I suspect he is a dork though
So that rules out Blood diamond part 2
Is this a business investment or a social justice initiative to lower the value of diamonds by increasing the supply?
Not very clever in any case:
(a) if diamonds can be made in a lab and diamonds are not differentiated between (natural or lab) then the supply will increase and the value of all diamonds will drop. He wont recoup his investment. Misery and exploitation in Africa will continue – it will just be something else instead of diamonds. The problem is not “diamonds” it is in their society.
(B) people will differentiate between natural and lab diamonds. This wont make any difference to Africa and he wont recoup a good investment because the price for lab diamonds will be low.
Might be good as a celebrity based social awareness campaign where hollywood stars right all the wrongs in Africa though. The Africans really need feminism too. Much more than food or infrastructure. We need to export our values to them.
Why? Diamond production is in massive surplus now anyway. Many Russian and Australian producers can’t even sell their current stock.
If you can make diamonds then its a game changer. Its only a matter of time before others copy and they start to lose value. I wouldnt invest in this company (if i had any money)
This won’t work for jewellery. A large part of the mystique of diamonds is that they have been created by natural forces deep in the earth over millions of years and have been won from the earth at great expense.
The diamonds that can be made cheaply in a lab have no romance to them and therefor no appeal. They will just be another stone, no different from zirconium.
I can’t believe DeCarpio doesn’t understand this.
Now if these artificial diamonds are indistinguishable from natural diamonds and can be released onto the market and passed off as real diamonds then that might be a game changer. It would destroy the luxury diamond industry completely. Perhaps that is the intention.
have your say