Benny Landa Chairman LUSIX
Lusix, a producer of lab-grown diamonds (LGD) backed by Israeli entrepreneur and inventor Benny Landa, is in danger of shuttering. While the company raised $150 million in investments, it is now looking for protection from $15 million of debt owed to Bank Leumi, Israel Discount Bank and Amot Investments. Lusix’s problems result from a 90% drop in the value of lab-grown diamonds.
Apparently, it turns out that artificial diamonds are not a girl’s best friend.
The company asked a court to grant it six weeks in order to attempt to complete a merger with another firm. Should Lusix complete the merger, the company says it will then have the capital needed to pay back its creditors.
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Lab-grown diamonds, also known as synthetic diamonds, are diamonds produced by a manufacturing process, as contrasted with natural diamonds created by geological processes and extracted by mining. Lab-grown diamonds are chemically and physically no different from natural diamonds. But are they also a girl’s best friend?
Based in Modi’in, lusix was founded in 2016 when it was spun-off from the Landa Group as a separate disruptive business around co-founder and current CTO Dr. Yossi Yayon and, Lusix boasts that it is a prime grower of lab-grown diamonds committed to supplying affordable luxury to environmentally and socially aware consumers. The Landa group was founded by Benny Landa about a decade ago. It was while working at Landa Labs that Lusix co-founder and CTO, Dr. Yossi Yayon, developed the company’s technology for growing diamonds.
Born in Poland in 1946 to Holocaust survivors, Benny Landa boasts that he changed the course of the printing industry at IPEX in 1993, when he unveiled the E-Print 1000, the world’s first digital color printing press. He came to be known as the father of digital printing.
In 1971, he and a colleague founded Imtec, a company that would later become Europe’s largest micrographics company. Benny invented the company’s core imaging technology, and while researching liquid toners, worked on a method of high-speed image development that would later lead to his groundbreaking invention of ElectroInk.
