Southern Jewelry News spoke with Rapaport CEO Dan Mano about the company’s rebrand, its new Rapaport Trade platform, a free matched diamond set calculator, and how live market data and AI tools are designed to help retail jewelers operate more profitably.
Rapaport has spent the past year building up its technology core and market intelligence infrastructure in line with the direction set by its recently appointed CEO, Dan Mano. Much of their new approach is aimed at helping retailer jewelers secure more revenue through Rapaport services that they rely on to price and source natural diamonds for their clients. The most visible sign came with a group-wide rebrand that folded the Rapaport Diamond Price List, Rapaport News, Rapaport Intelligence, and Rapaport Auctions into a single connected ecosystem, with RapNet taking on a new name: Rapaport Trade.
Spearheading this change, Dan is a 20-year technology veteran who helped grow Perion Network to a $1.9 billion valuation and previously served as Chief Revenue Officer at MyHeritage, which was acquired for $600 million.
Southern Jewelry News: Let’s talk about the rebrand. RapNet is now Rapaport Trade. What does this actually change for a retailer who logs on to source diamonds?
Dan Mano: Rapaport was groundbreaking at its launch of a networking platform but evolved to be so much more. Rapaport Trade reflects what the platform is becoming: not just a listing board to browse diamond and gem inventory, but a full trading platform that supports communication, documentation, payment, and fulfillment in one place. For a retailer filling out a display or sourcing a custom order, that means less time bouncing between a phone call, a price check, and a payment process, and more time running the store. We organized the rest of the business the same way: Rapaport Diamond Price List for benchmark pricing, Rapaport News for industry information, Rapaport Intelligence for market research, and Rapaport Auctions, our platform for selling pre-owned diamonds, another way for retailers to liquidate inventory. It’s the same platform retailers already know, just enhanced: a sleeker look, more tools to help them make better buying decisions, and everything in one place.
Southern Jewelry News: You’ve also released practical tools designed with retailers in mind, such as the free matched diamond set calculator. Tell us about that.
Dan Mano: That one’s a good example of listening to a real, everyday problem retailers deal with and finding solutions to help them. Retail jewelers building an eternity band, a tennis bracelet, or a diamond necklace constantly ask themselves: how many diamonds fit around a size 8 finger, or what’s the total carat weight for a full eternity band in ovals? Historically, that meant a call to a supplier, a hand sketch, or waiting on a CAD file. We created a free, time-saving Matched Set Diamond Calculator that instantly provides an estimate. A retailer plugs in the size, the shape, the setting style, and gets a real-time layout, stone count, carat weight, and a safe ordering range they can share with a client or supplier. It’s a small tool in the scheme of everything we’re building, but it saves a jeweler real time on a real sale.
Southern Jewelry News: Rapaport recently reaffirmed its commitment to natural diamonds and announced an official policy excluding lab-grown diamonds. Why take that stance now, and what does it mean for jewelry retailers?
Dan Mano: I’m sorry, but we cannot stand behind selling a synthetic-diamond engagement ring for $5,000 when, after the buyer leaves the store, it may be worth little more than the gold it contains, just a few hundred dollars. I’m not sure consumers fully understand this. So-called lab-grown, synthetic diamonds are selling for less than $100 per carat today. Rapaport has spent more than four decades building the integrity and trust that sustain the natural diamond market, and we will not put that at risk by endorsing manufactured alternatives. We support one market: natural diamonds. Their rarity, integrity, and inherent value are not just foundations of the industry. They are the reason our industry exists. A mined diamond, formed over billions of years, carries a story and an emotional significance that synthetic stones cannot replicate. That is what a retailer is selling. Every platform we operate, including Rapaport Trade, Rapaport Auctions, the Rapaport Diamond Price List, and Rapaport Intelligence, is dedicated exclusively to natural diamonds. That matters for retailers, too, because trust is part of what they sell. When a supplier or retailer also carries lab-grown diamonds, we ask for clear disclosure and strict separation from mined stones. Synthetic diamonds have placed real pressure on natural diamond prices, and every retailer selling natural diamonds has a stake in keeping that distinction clear. That is what safeguarding the prosperity of the natural diamond economy means.
Southern Jewelry News: You recently announced what you’re calling the first AI agent built for the diamond trade. How would something like that actually help a retailer, rather than just a wholesaler?
Dan Mano: Everyone in this industry already lives inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Those models are brilliant, and they have also become ordinary. They learned from everything published online, which means they know almost everything about diamonds except the one thing that decides a deal: what’s happening with diamond prices right now. That part never reaches the public internet because it lives inside the trade. It’s the price a buyer is paying right now, the parcels that are moving while others sit, and what roughly 20,000 dealers across 103 countries are searching for before they commit. We connected an agent directly to that record: Rapaport Trade’s live trading data, the Rapaport Diamond Price List, and how our customers search and buy. For a jewelry retailer, that’s the difference between buying what a supplier says is popular and buying what the market is proving is popular right now. No general model has ever seen this data, because it has never left the trade. I spent twenty years in tech before I came to diamonds, and I have rarely seen a vertical dataset this deep behind a single product. We’re opening a beta waiting list for anyone who wants early access.
Southern Jewelry News: What’s your long-term vision for Rapaport, and what should jewelry retailers expect from it?
Dan Mano: I want Rapaport to become something like the Bloomberg of diamonds: the trusted, transparent hub professionals turn to for pricing, inventory, deal-making and market intelligence, all in one place. Our tagline says it plainly: we exist to safeguard the prosperity of the natural diamond economy. That matters on the sales floor as much as the trading room. Retailers need an honest story to tell customers about value, built on pricing and market data they can trust. Everything we build is in service of making that economy more efficient, transparent and fair, for retailers most of all.
