Natural diamonds are made from pure carbon and form over billions of years under high pressure and temperature, at depths of over 100 km in the Earth's mantle. But Diamond Foundry grows its stones inside a plasma reactor, atom by atom, from a tiny slice of a "mother diamond" mined in Canada. The process takes about a month.
The idea is to produce diamonds that are indistinguishable from their natural counterparts, but free of the controversies associated with real diamonds.
The diamond industry has been tainted by its association with "blood diamonds," which are mined to fund conflict and civil war. The profits have been used by warlords and rebels to buy arms during conflicts in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Liberia. As well as diamonds fueling conflict, thousands of men, women and children in countries such as Sierra Leone have been used as slaves to extract diamonds using primitive, back-breaking methods.
The Kimberley Process, which regulates the trade of rough diamonds, says conflict diamonds make up only 0.1% of the world's current production. But buying from Diamond Foundry should give consumers total peace of mind.
"We have sustainable diamonds that have none of these practices involved," says Diamond Foundry's Austrian-American CEO and founder Martin Roscheisen.
The company raised capital of over $100 million from 12 billionaires, including Twitter founder Evan Williams and actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio, who contacted Diamond Foundry after hearing about them.
"Nobody knew about us then, but it's pretty rare for Silicon Valley to have a tech company focused on diamonds, so word of mouth was going around," says Roscheisen.
DiCaprio, who starred in the 2007 film "Blood Diamond," which explores the conflict around the mining industry in war-torn regions of Africa, has endorsed the company's ethical approach to diamond production.
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