COMPANY

Name: Liquid Diamonds

Legal Name: Liquid Diamonds, Inc.

Location: New York, New York

Founded: 2017

Founder(s): Kashyap Mehta

Website: https://liquid.diamonds/ 

Social Media: 61 followers on LinkedIn

Industry: Global Diamond Market

Size: $82B in 2017 (Source: The Diamond Insight Report 2018, De Beers)

Introduction

Liquid Diamonds is a B2B company which operates a digital commodity exchange for diamond trading online. The company’s solution is unique because it disrupts a massive offline industry which was unable to find a method to bring standardized prices and liquidity to diamonds. Since every diamond is different and unique, which is part of its allure, they are not identical and interchangeable. This is what prevented traditional commodity exchanges – both online and offline – to trade in diamonds. Liquid Diamonds claims to have solved this problem.

The Product

The company’s platform deploys a patented double auction technology which allows diamond traders, cutters, retail jewelers, and financial traders to trade diamonds on what the company claims is the first and only truly liquid digital exchange for diamonds. By allowing simultaneous competition on both the sell and demand sides in a double auction, the patented platform has effectively crowdsourced diamond valuation and created price discovery. 

Origin and Founding Team

Liquid Diamonds was founded in February 2017 by Kashyap Metha, who has 16+ years of experience with 12+ in developing technology tools for diamonds as the Founder of Diamond Technology Solutions. Before that, he was a Senior Software Engineer for Electronic Arts. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 2003 with a Bachelors in Computer Science.

Mark Molloy is the CTO of Liquid Diamonds. He has ~40 years of experience working as a Software Engineer until early 2005 after graduating from the University of California – Irvine in 1979. In 2005, he started Liquid Markets, Inc. to find ways to commercialize the concept of double auctions outside of stock exchanges.

Chetan Gupta is the Lead Engineer at Liquid Diamonds. He graduated from IIT Kanpur in 2012, after which he worked at some small technology firms until he started working with Kashyap from December 2013 at Diamond Technology Solutions.

Trends and Performance

The company has raised $350K and was a member of the first class of Techstars Bangalore ‘19. The company’s website claims to have 50+ accredited suppliers, list 250k diamonds worth $750M (30% of the global primary market) and has already received bids of $70M and has a GMV of $11M.