Diamonds in the rough: Diamond Foundry, Squareknot and more

The world of tech startups is vast, expansive and sometimes overwhelming. There are thousands of great services emerging around the world and it’s impossible to be aware of all of them. Discovering early stage startups is even harder.

We thought we’d do our part to highlight some interesting, novel and downright awesome startups every week by sifting through the newest members of the Index.co community.

Here are this week’s notable companies:

Diamond Foundry

Diamond Foundry claims it can produce hundreds of quality, real-diamonds in just two weeks. The company aims to relieve the diamond industry of its environmental and humanitarian footprint by removing the need to mine the raw materials. Among many other well-known investors, Leonardo DiCaprio is backing the recently-launched company.

Squareknot

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If you want to know how to do something, you might hit WikiHow or YouTube to find a how-to guide. While these often work well enough, they’re not always perfect and are, above all, linear. Enter Squareknot. The platform lets you make guides and branch them out to guides on related subjects at any given step. With Thanksgiving around the corner, there’s sure to be many ways to make the most of this (turducken, anyone?).

Code Kingdoms

A game that teaches kids how to code, Code Kingdoms allows them to build their own games and share them with friends. A great idea, as a common piece of advice dispensed to coding newbies (and an exercise in many a coding course) is to build a game. Learning by doing, as they say. The company recently raised a $1.4 million seed round.

ZapChain

The existence of social networks like Quora and HackerNews prove that there’s a market out there for communities that provide oversight to ensure quality content. ZapChain’s answer to that proposition is monetization: members of communities on ZapChain can send each other bitcoin bits in the form of microtransactions for posting good content and engaging in discussions.

Skyspec

Skyspec is an automated data collection and analytics platform to collect infrastructure data… with drones! The company recently hauled in $3 million in funding for its product that streamlines and facilitates the process of dangerous inspections of things like wind turbines.

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