The company is already in Dizraptor’s portfolio since Mar 10. New offerings are possible in the future
About the Company
Diamond Foundry is America's #1 producer of man-made diamonds for the jewelry and semiconductor industries. The company cultures diamonds with a zero carbon footprint and offers diamond jewelry from independent designers.
The founding team of M.I.T., Stanford, and Princeton engineers previously developed pioneering breakthroughs in solar power technology – and had a hunch that techniques used to harness the energy of the sun could also be used to make a better diamond, atom by atom.
Currently, the company has one factory that is located in Washington and is looking at opening a second factory, possibly overseas.
Diamond Foundry’s investors include actor Leonardo DiCaprio, Twitter/Medium founder Evan Williams, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Facebook co-founder Andrew McCollum, former eBay founder and president Jeff Skoll, Google founding investor Andy Bechtolsheim, Tony Fadell, Founder of Nest and inventor of the iPod and iPhone, and many others.
Market Opportunities
The global jewellery market attainted a value of $228B in the year 2020. The market is further anticipated to grow in the forecast period of 2022-2027 at a CAGR of 5.1% to reach $307B by 2026.
The decrease in mined diamonds market share creates an opportunity for lab-grown diamonds. The market for lab-grown diamond jewelry market is estimated to be $2B by the end of 2021 and is poised to almost double in size by 2025 and reach $3.9B.
Financials and Valuation
Diamond Foundry has raised a total of $353M in five rounds of financing. In March 2021, the company raised $200M from Fidelity at $1.8B. The funding will help Diamond Foundry in its aim to quintuple production at its Washington state factory to as much as 5m carats a year by the end of 2022.
Diamond Foundry has doubled production in each of the past four years. It says that it is selling lab-grown diamonds at higher prices than some natural stones, at an average of $282 per rough carat and made a profit in 2020.
Risks
Diamond Foundry faces strong competition from a number of firms, like Lightbox as well as Pandora and Swarovski. A lot of the lab-grown producers want to get the price lower and the quality better and get scalability up. That will ultimately lead to lower-priced output.
One of the key advantages of lab-grown diamonds is that they are environmentally friendly, but in the market of natural stones, only 4% are considered to be of questionable origin, while the rest of the miners are introducing tracing. This leads to transparency of the mining process and the end-user can now trace his diamond and be sure of its environmental friendliness.
Sources
Diamond Foundry valued at $1.8bn after $200m fundraising, Financial Times, April 2021
Lab-Grown Diamond Jewelry Market May Almost Double By 2025, JCK, October 2021