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Leonardo DiCaprio Has a Diamond Proposal for You

DiCaprio's tweet last November announcing his "proud" investment in a company "reducing human and environmental toll by sustainably culturing diamonds" alerted the planet to the little-known start-up co-founded in 2012

From: phys.orgDate: 2016-07-14 06:48:39Views: 421

Leonardo DiCaprio has a diamond proposal for you. The Oscar winner is among an elite circle of Hollywood and Silicon Valley backers behind Diamond Foundry (Disruptor No. 33), a Bay Area company that claims it uses technology to accomplish what alchemists and others have attempted in vain for centuries: growing diamonds and other precious stones from scratch.

DiCaprio's tweet last November announcing his "proud" investment in a company "reducing human and environmental toll by sustainably culturing diamonds" alerted the planet to the little-known start-up co-founded in 2012 by former solar energy entrepreneur Martin Roscheisen. DiCaprio joined a venture party that includes Silicon Valley titans such as Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were in the same Ph.D. program with Roscheisen at Stanford.

Far from the "blood diamonds" that were the subject of DiCaprio's 2006 film on African warlords profiting off the gem trade, these stones are born inside a plasma reactor at the headquarters of Diamond Foundry in San Carlos, California. DiCaprio's pledge sent instant shockwaves through a global diamond industry valued at $85 billion.

Man-made diamonds aren't new (General Electric pioneered the trick in 1954), but Diamond Foundry is so far the most aggressive in monetizing the value of a process called "chemical vapor deposition," which uses a high-energy 8,000-degree plasma field to hot-forge diamonds from layers of carbon atoms.

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