Sarine, Tracr, and the Tech Pivot: The Antwerp–Tel Aviv–Dubai Triangle

The Olam · Diamonds & the Bourse

While the Israeli cutting industry hollowed out, Sarine Technologies built the global standard for diamond scanning. A 2025 partnership with De Beers' Tracr blockchain locks in the information layer of the trade. Israel's diamond export is no longer the diamond — it is the software that proves the diamond.

Sarine Technologies Ltd, headquartered in Hod HaSharon and dual-listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (SARN.TA) and the Singapore Exchange (U77), is the most consequential technology company most of the diamond industry has never heard of. Its planning, scanning, and inclusion-mapping equipment is installed in essentially every significant diamond cutting house in Surat, Mumbai, Antwerp, New York, and Ramat Gan. By company-disclosed figures, roughly 100 million diamonds annually pass through Sarine's systems. The global cutting industry runs on Israeli software.

In February 2025, Sarine signed a collaboration agreement with Tracr Limited, the De Beers Group subsidiary that operates the world's first fully distributed diamond blockchain platform. The agreement integrates Tracr's source-registered rough diamond records with Sarine's scanning and identification technology, creating what both companies describe as an objective, algorithmically based traceability solution from rough source to polished retail.

The deal is an industrial milestone. The most durable export of the Israeli diamond industry is no longer the diamond. It is the certification of the diamond. The information layer of the global trade is being constructed in Tel Aviv, sold to Antwerp, deployed in Surat, and used to clear inventory in Dubai. The geography of physical trade has fragmented; the technology layer has consolidated.

What Sarine built

Sarine was founded in 1988 by members of the Israel Precious Stones and Diamonds Exchange in Ramat Gan, in what was then a routine equipment-manufacturing shop serving local cutters. Over three decades the company expanded into a vertically integrated technology stack covering essentially every step of the polished diamond production process.

The Galaxy® family — the company's flagship product line — performs inclusion mapping and tension analysis on rough diamonds, producing three-dimensional models that allow cutters to plan the maximum-value polished outcome from each rough stone. The Advisor® software optimizes the cutting plan computationally. The Quazer® laser cutting and shaping tools execute the plan. The Meteor® system performs automated grading. The Sarine Profile® system provides retail-facing visualization for finished diamonds. The Diamond Journey™ traceability platform — the system now integrating with Tracr — links a diamond's identity from rough to polished using algorithmic fingerprinting rather than physical inscription.

The strategic position is unusual. Sarine does not compete with diamond producers, traders, or retailers. It sells to all of them. The Galaxy systems sit in Surat cutting houses owned by Indian families. The grading and traceability infrastructure is licensed to bourses, retailers, and certification labs across three continents. Sarine is a tool vendor to an entire industry — the picks-and-shovels position in a value chain that has otherwise contracted.

What Tracr is

Tracr is a blockchain-based diamond provenance platform launched by De Beers in 2018 and operated as a subsidiary of the De Beers Group. The platform registers rough diamonds at the producer source — at mine or sort — and follows each registered stone through its movements down the value chain, generating cryptographic records of ownership, location, and certification events.

By May 2024, De Beers reported that more than two-thirds of its global rough production by value was being registered on Tracr, with 1.5 million individual rough diamonds added to the platform during 2023 alone, bringing the total registered to roughly 2 million stones. By early 2025, that figure had passed 3 million. De Beers also began providing single-country-of-origin information for all rough diamonds of one carat and above registered on Tracr.

The platform was initially built to support De Beers' own supply chain integrity. By 2024–2025, it had pivoted into a broader industry infrastructure play, opening to non-De Beers rough and positioning itself as the de facto blockchain layer for global diamond provenance.

Why the partnership matters

The fundamental problem with diamond traceability has always been the seam between rough and polished. A rough diamond entering a cutting house in Surat as a single stone often exits as multiple polished diamonds. A polished diamond purchased in Antwerp and re-traded in Dubai accumulates a paper trail that has historically depended on dealer attestation rather than physical verification. Earlier traceability systems — Forevermark's branding model, Kimberley Process certification, Gemological Institute of America origin reports — relied on declarations from entities along the chain. The declarations were trusted in proportion to the reputation of the declarer. They were not algorithmic.

The Sarine–Tracr integration changes that. A rough diamond is scanned at the mine using Tracr's blockchain registration. The Sarine Galaxy system at the cutting house scans the same rough stone, generates a unique inclusion fingerprint, and registers the planned polished outcomes. Sarine's matching algorithms — using the rough-to-polished prediction models built into the planning software — algorithmically link the resulting polished diamonds back to the original rough record on the Tracr blockchain. The result is an objective, algorithmic, non-declarative traceability chain from source to retail.

The implication for industry economics: provenance becomes verifiable rather than asserted. The G7 Russian-diamond import restrictions implemented in 2024 created an urgent regulatory demand for exactly this capability. Importing nations needed proof that diamonds were not Russian-origin. Sarine and Tracr, in combination, provide it.

The triangle

The post-2020 diamond trade operates as a triangle of specialized geographies, with the technology layer floating above all three corners.

Antwerp retains the regulatory and certification gravity. The Antwerp World Diamond Centre, the Hoge Raad voor Diamant (HRD), and the European regulatory infrastructure around Kimberley compliance and anti-money-laundering remain concentrated in Belgium. The Antwerp diamond cutting and trading industry has contracted but the institutional positioning has not.

Tel Aviv — meaning principally Ramat Gan and Hod HaSharon — retains the technology layer (Sarine), the certification infrastructure, the high-end large polished trade, and the financing relationships. The four-tower compound that anchored the trade for sixty years is covered in Part 2 of this series. The cutting industry has gone, but the information infrastructure has stayed.

Dubai has captured the trading floor — the rough and polished tender markets, the bulk clearing trade, the bilateral CEPA-enabled trade with Israel and India, the access to Surat. The Dubai Diamond Exchange, housed in the DMCC's Almas Tower, is now the world's largest diamond trading venue by volume — a deliberate policy win that Part 5 of this series examines in depth.

Surat, the implicit fourth corner, runs the cutting layer. The Indian cutting industry handles roughly 90 percent of the world's polishing by volume.

The technology layer cuts across all four. Sarine's systems are in Surat. Tracr's blockchain registers diamonds from Botswanan and Canadian mines. The certification labs span Antwerp, Tel Aviv, and increasingly Dubai. The information moves freely; the diamonds move expensively.

Where the capital rotated

The Israeli technology pivot in diamonds is part of a broader pattern that has played out across multiple traditional Israeli export industries — agriculture, defense, water, cybersecurity, fintech. In each case, a labor-intensive Israeli industry hollowed out and was replaced by a technology and IP layer built on top of the institutional memory of the prior industry.

Diamond capital has rotated in three visible directions. First, into Israeli technology: Sarine itself, the broader diamond-tech ecosystem, and adjacent computer-vision and AI ventures backed by former diamantaires. Second, into real estate: Tel Aviv commercial property, London residential, and US commercial holdings absorbed billions of dollars that previously sat in diamond inventory. Third, into family offices and private investment: multi-generational diamond fortunes that compounded inside private companies through the 1970s–2000s have been restructured into single-family offices investing across venture capital, private equity, and infrastructure. The cutters' inheritances are now in the venture funds, not in the polishing wheels.

The institutional implication

The TASE-listed Sarine, with a market capitalization in the low hundreds of millions, is not a large company by global tech standards. But it is dominant in its niche, and the niche has expanded as the diamond industry has been forced to adopt verifiable traceability. The 2025 Tracr partnership effectively makes Sarine's scanning infrastructure the global default for source-to-polished verification. There is no competing solution at equivalent scale.

The longer-term play is institutional. As G7 sanctions architecture extends — and as importing nations in Europe, North America, and Asia require increasingly granular provenance — the demand for the Sarine–Tracr stack will rise. The Israeli technology layer will likely capture an expanding share of the global diamond value chain even as physical Israeli trade in diamonds continues to contract. The diamond will be cut in Surat, traded in Dubai, certified by Sarine, and registered on Tracr.

What it means for the bourse

The Israel Diamond Exchange in Ramat Gan has been navigating the contraction by positioning itself as a tech-forward bourse — hosting AI and blockchain working groups, integrating Sarine and Tracr capabilities into trading workflows, and emphasizing the certification and information advantages that remain anchored in Israel. Membership has shrunk. Trading volumes have shrunk. The institutional value has shifted from physical clearing to verification, financing, and high-end inventory.

Whether the IDE can sustain itself on this thinner base — with Dubai capturing the bulk trade and Surat capturing the cutting — is the central strategic question for the Israeli industry over the next decade. The technology layer is profitable. It is also high-margin and low-employment. The question is whether high-margin information businesses can sustain the physical infrastructure of a bourse built for an industry an order of magnitude larger.

The lesson

The Israeli diamond industry chose, twice, to retreat upmarket. The first retreat — from mass cutting to high-end cutting — was forced by Indian competition and worked for two decades. The second retreat — from high-end cutting to information infrastructure — was forced by lab-grown displacement and is now underway.

Each retreat captured less labor and more margin. The first preserved roughly 5,000 jobs at higher pay per worker. The second preserves perhaps 1,000 jobs at substantially higher pay per worker, plus a few hundred software and engineering positions at Sarine, the certification labs, and adjacent technology firms.

The diamond, as a physical object, is cut where labor is cheapest, traded where regulation is lightest, and financed where capital is most patient. The certification of the diamond — the proof that it is what it claims to be — is built in Israel, registered on De Beers' blockchain, and sold globally. That is the layer Israel chose to keep.

The cutters' workshops along Tuval Street are mostly empty. The Sarine engineering offices in Hod HaSharon are full. The trade has not died. It migrated up the value chain, into a layer of software, algorithms, and cryptographic registries. The diamond has become a data point. Israel built the database.