Cultured Diamonds are Obvious

Why we invested in Diamond Foundry, a California startup creating gem-quality diamonds in a new way: by growing them in a lab.

In April, 2014, Obvious Ventures was just getting started. Ev Williams, Vishal Vasishth, and I were fired up about creating a new kind of venture capital firm that provides early stage capital and expertise to #worldpositive startups. For us, #worldpositive means building disruptive products and services to solve systemic challenges in the world. One of our earliest investments was in a stealth California startup called Diamond Foundry.

Ev and I have both known Diamond Foundry CEO Martin Roscheisen for many many years. I knew that Martin and his co-founder Jeremy Scholz, who had worked together at Nanosolar, were cooking up a crazy, ambitious plan: build plasma reactors to grow diamonds. When I visited them in early 2014 I was blown away by how much engineering progress they had made and felt Diamond Foundry would be a perfect fit for Obvious Ventures. Here’s why…

Diamond has the highest hardness and thermal conductivity of any bulk material — wikipedia

1. Diamond is an extremely valuable material. Not just as a treasured gemstone, but also for many scientific and engineering uses including precision cutting tools, optical networking lenses, and advanced heat transfer systems.
2. Traditional diamond mining in Africa has created well-documented social and environmental problems. This 2009 report from Human Rights Watch describes killings, torture, and child labor resulting from the fight over diamond mining in Zimbabwe. While socially responsible diamond mining is occurring in Canada and other countries, it still requires massive amounts of energy and disturbance of soil and water. No mater how you slice it, mining diamonds will always be an energy intensive treasure hunt for a limited, finite resource buried deep within the earth.
3. The customer is changing. Our hypothesis is that younger, millennial jewelry customers are significantly more aware of the social and environmental impact of their purchases than their parents were. Authenticity and sustainability will play a key role in their decision for an engagement ring.

After investing, we introduced Diamond Foundry to one of our Obvious Ventures investors and co-collaborators: Leonardo DiCaprio. You may know him for his acting work, but we know Leo as a tireless environmental activist and spokesperson.

Given that Leo also played the lead role in the 2006 film Blood Diamond it seemed like a perfect fit, and Leo and his team agreed.

We are thrilled to see Diamond Foundry launch this week. The company has paired their sustainable cultured diamonds with a growing list of top independent jewelry designers. You can shop for jewelry that matches your individual style, then select a Diamond Foundry diamond from a range of sizes (and prices). 100% of the jewelry setting cost is passed on to the designer, who creates your custom piece and ships it directly to you.

We hope you share our excitement for this big idea: reinvent diamond mining and turn a damaging, unsustainable means of obtaining a valuable resource into a clean, sustainable business. Cultured diamonds bring a big disruption to the $100B diamond industry — now that’s Obvious.