Lucara Diamond Corporation’s Clara Diamond Solutions subsidiary has entered into a collaboration agreement with diamond industry technology developer Sarine Technologies.
Clara, a digital sales platform acquired by Lucara in February, will be the exclusive, worldwide customer for customised interfaces and versions of Sarine's Galaxy inclusion mapping technology and Advisor optimal rough planning technology, which it will use with its digital diamond sales platform.
Clara, which will hold its inaugural rough diamond sale in the third quarter, uses analytics together with cloud and blockchain technologies to sell diamonds individually, based on polished demand.
Under the terms of the collaboration agreement with Sarine, selected diamonds recovered at a participating mine site will undergo inclusion mapping using Galaxy technology, creating a digital fingerprint that will be uploaded to the Clara platform.
Simultaneously, diamond buyers will be uploading their specific polished diamond requirements in terms of size, cut, colour and quality for their specific needs, creating an order within Clara.
Clara will use Sarine's Advisor optimal rough planning technology, together with its own proprietary analytics, to match individual, scanned rough diamonds to the buyers’ optimal polished requirements.
“Clara is delighted to be partnering with Sarine in a ground-breaking collaboration agreement that will align Sarine and Clara in their efforts to create a new, leading sales channel for rough diamonds globally,” Lucara CEO Eira Thomas commented on Monday.
Sarine Technologies CEO David Block added that the agreement would unlock value throughout the diamond supply chain.
“It will provide numerous benefits to the industry, as well as to Sarine, as it broadens our addressable market into the upstream mining and producing segment of the diamond industry value chain. It is also the first opportunity to extend our pay-per-services paradigm to the actual planning of rough diamonds. We plan to further cooperate with Clara on its provenance blockchain initiative,” he added.
Clara will initiate sales on its platform using selected diamonds from Lucara’s Karowe mine, in Botswana, and has reached agreement with a selection of diamond manufacturers and jewellery houses to participate in a trial of the platform in the third quarter.