OUR TEAM
Engineers, PhDs, gemologists, data scientists, and MBAs working to take the stress out of this purchase for you
Leadership
Ajay Anand
CEO
Ajay was a regular dude looking for an engagement ring for his girlfriend and had an idea to make shopping better. Heâs still a regular dude, but Rare Carat has taken over his life. He was the founder of an enterprise SaaS co used by the UN in over 50 countries to deliver aid saving 1m lives. He was also a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. He holds a Wharton MBA, Penn MA, and UMich BBA.
Apeksha Kothari
COO
Apeksha went to business school thinking she would leave the diamond industry forever - after coming from a fifth-generation diamond family and working in the industry since undergrad. Yep, that didnât happen. Sheâs back working with diamonds, and is now possibly the most intimidating person in the world to buy an engagement ring for. She earned her MBA at Harvard Business School and her bachelor's degree from Oxford.
Advisors
Karl Ulrich
Karl taught Ajayâs startup class at Wharton, where he is the Dean of Entrepreneurship, Heâs founded several companies and holds 24 patents. The NYTimes called his company Terrapass one of the most noteworthy ideas of 2005, and Business Week called his Xootr scooter one of the 50 coolest products of the 21st Century. Karl holds BS, MS, PhD degrees from MIT.
Latif Peracha
Latif is the Managing Director of Richard Bransonâs investments. He has invested in Slack and Capsule, and serves on the board of Ring in addition to several Virgin boards. He holds a BBA from Michigan and an MBA from Columbia.
Tom Taira
Tom messaged us one day, when he stumbled on our site shopping for a diamond: âThis is a smart service. I started a company called TrueCar that does the same for cars.â Of course we knew TrueCar - it was on page two of our pitch deck. He holds a BA from UC Irvine and MBA from Georgetown.
Vijay Talwar
Vijay was introduced to us through a friend who heard we were building a âdiamond thingâ. After all, he was the CEO of Blue Nile. Heâs currently President of Footlocker Digital, and has held C-level positions at Nike and the Clinton Foundation. He is a former Bain consultant and holds several degrees, including an MBA from the University of Chicago.
Diamond Experts
Our diamond team rocks. See what we did there? Theyâve earned gemology degrees at the GIA, graded diamonds at the GIA, and even earned a PhD in diamonds from the London School of Economics - and between them have seen evaluated over a gazillion diamonds.
Amanda Gupta
Holly Albertson
Hugo Laverde
Jaime Gustafson
Kate McFarland
Karly Bulinski
Phoebe Shang
Dr. Rian Mulcahy
Sarah Rowe
Susie Choo
Data Science + IBM
The team works across AI tech, from machine learning to NLP, to help make diamond buying less frustrating and more transparent. They are senior engineers at IBM, have placed in the ranks of Kaggle, math and computer science PhDs, and studied at the top institutions around the world.
Dr. Antoan Milkov
Anass El-Idrissi
Avijit Chatterjee (IBM)
David Thomason (IBM)
Henri DĂ©sesquelles
Maxime Vallet
Oumayma Bounou
John Thomas (IBM)
Software Engineers
This team spans 4 continents and went from zero to millions of lines of code in no time flat to make pretty much everything see here. They are also responsible for all of the bugs you see here, and we encourage you to call their cell phones at odd hours of the night to complain until they are fixed (weâre kidding).
Akshay Kajal
Edin Sitarevic
Gustavo Garcia
Kamal Sharma
Mohammed Javed
Mukesh Yadav
Sagar Sethi
Sarbanjeet Singh
Semir Babajic
Vikram Kundu
Business
It takes a village to raise a diamond company. From Marketing to Finance to HR and beyond, these guys are 'brilliant'.
Carrie Eller
Millissa Mathai
Harish Bansal
Andrea Cammi
Jay Patel
Salinia Pringle
Suraj Maurya
Jenny Beres
A big thanks to Luis Leon and Bruce Weed at IBM, who have helped us grow with technology investment and connections to Watson, big data, and cloud experts in their organization.