Online pricing could create price transparency in an industry that depends on opacity. It could also be the bane of the diamond industry. He likens it to an “extremely smart, unbiased jeweler.” “There’s high information asymmetry between you and this bot… and it’s a perfectly structured decision.”Īny queries around cut, color, clarity and carat can be handled by the database to serve up a decision on the best ring for the best price, Anand says. ”įor Anand, there are few better use cases for a bot than diamond shopping. As a consumer, I’m absolutely sure I’m going to get screwed. “It’s as much money as I spent on my fucking car on a little rock. “There’s a lot of money to be saved if someone can help you with this game,” Anand says. For good measure, Anand also throws virtual and augmented reality into the mix (I’m not sure where, but apparently the company uses ’em). Bootstrapped with $1 million, the company is on pace to hit $20 million in diamond sales this year.īehind the scenes is a chatbot powered by Watson and a network of sellers guaranteed by another IBM partner, the blockchain-based diamond ledger, Everledger. The company was born out of Anand’s own frustrations shopping for a ring. The Chinese fund CSC Venture Capital also got into the action investing as part of a $10 million round in the rejuvenation of one of the dot-com boom’s diamond busts, the Austin-based Ice.com. Last year Bain Capital spent $500 million to acquire Blue Nile, an online diamond jewelry retailer, while the Indian online jewelry retailer raised $30 million in a July financing.
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RARE CARET SERIAL
Martin Roscheisen, the San Francisco-based serial entrepreneur who founded FindLaw, TradingDynamics, eGroups and the solar technology company Nanosolar, raised $100 million in 2015 for a company called Diamond Foundry, which makes lab-grown diamonds. Numbers like that, in an industry that’s notoriously opaque, invariably grab the attention of startup companies. To this day, and in this culture, it seems if you like it, you better put a ring on it.
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The status of the diamond ring as the highest material manifestation of true love was cemented in 1947 by a Philadelphia ad woman, Frances Gerety, who penned the slogan “A diamond is forever.”ĭiamond jewelry sales peaked at $72 billion, based on data from Statista through 2013, and data from Bain & Co. De Beers (pretty much the sole proprietor for diamonds in the world for over a century) made a concerted push on popular culture to make diamonds a thing. The power of diamond rings in pop culture was cemented long before Marilyn Monroe’s swanning across a soundstage.