NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 21, 2026--
Rapaport, the trusted pricing and market data authority for the natural diamond market, today announced a comprehensive company rebrand designed to unify its pricing, trading, market intelligence, auctions, and news platforms under a single master brand.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260520379139/en/
As the cornerstone of this transition, RapNet, the industry's largest online diamond trading network, has officially become Rapaport Trade.
The transition marks Rapaport's evolution from a suite of individual business units into a connected ecosystem built around how diamond professionals actually work. For the first time, professionals will engage with a unified ecosystem where benchmark pricing from the Rapaport Price List, market intelligence, and access to more than 1.8 million natural diamonds across a global trading network work together. The result is a more connected workflow that helps buyers and sellers make faster, more confident decisions.
For existing RapNet members, the transition to Rapaport Trade is completely seamless. All user accounts, network connections, direct chats, and active inventory listings remain fully intact and operational with no required action from users.
"The market is changing, and professionals in this industry need tools that reflect that," said Dan Mano, CEO of Rapaport. "Bringing pricing, trading, news and market intelligence together under one platform helps professionals work faster and make better decisions. Rapaport Trade is the practical result of that."
"Diamond professionals need to move fast, and they cannot do that if they are forced to bounce between disconnected tools to check pricing data, vet suppliers, and source stones," said Benzi Kluwgant, CMO at Rapaport. "RapNet is now Rapaport Trade because we are harnessing the resources and data of Rapaport, integrating our core technologies into a more powerful sourcing workflow. We are giving the industry a practical sourcing engine where pricing intelligence is connected to the ability to buy and sell natural diamonds directly, with no middlemen."
The rebrand reflects a broader, more technology-based and data-driven approach at Rapaport — building tools that respond to how professionals actually operate in today's market and positioning the company to serve the industry with greater speed and precision going forward.
The newly unified Rapaport ecosystem and the transition to Rapaport Trade will be showcased at the JCK Las Vegas show. CEO Dan Mano will discuss the company's strategic direction during the annual Rapaport Breakfast presentation on Sunday, May 31, followed by Martin Rapaport’s annual industry address.
Rapaport Trade will continue rolling out practical, data-driven tools designed to help professionals manage inventory and sourcing decisions more efficiently. These include Rapaport Polaris, a supply-and-demand pricing dashboard that gives manufacturers and suppliers visibility into cutting and sourcing decisions, and Rapaport SellerIQ, a buyer engagement analytics platform that shows sellers how buyers are engaging with specific inventory across the network.
Rapaport Trade remains exclusively dedicated to natural diamonds. Rapaport's mission — to safeguard the prosperity of the natural diamond economy — is the foundation of everything the company builds. That means an unwavering commitment to natural diamonds only, ethical sourcing, and transparency across the global supply chain. The transition to Rapaport Trade is a direct expression of that mission.
For more information, visit rapaport.com.
About Rapaport
Rapaport Group includes Rapaport News, delivering industry-leading content across digital platforms, including news coverage, interviews, editorial features, original storytelling and branded content initiatives; Rapaport Analysis, providing in-depth research on the global diamond and colored-gemstone markets, including demand and pricing trends and the benchmark Price List for diamonds; Rapaport Trade (formerly RapNet), the world’s largest online diamond- and gemstone-trading marketplace, with over $8 billion in daily diamond, gem and jewelry listings; and Rapaport Auctions, the world’s largest recycler of diamonds. Additional information is available at www.rapaport.com.
Rapaport Announces Group-Wide Rebrand to Lead the Diamond Industry's Evolution in a Changing Market, with RapNet Transitioning to Rapaport Trade
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — As negotiations with the United States hang in the balance, a hard-line Iranian general linked to notorious attacks at home and abroad over the past decades is believed to have seized a place near the center of power.
Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, who heads Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, has become a major player in formulating Iran’s tough stance in negotiating a possible end to the war with the United States, experts say. He is believed to be part of a small clique in direct contact with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khameini, who remains in hiding after being reportedly wounded in the Feb. 28 Israeli strikes that killed his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Like everything in Iran since the war began, who ultimately controls decision-making remains uncertain. As people within the upper ranks of Iran's theocracy vie for power, they can gain or lose favor quickly. Vahidi himself hasn't been seen publicly since Feb. 8, weeks before the war began. On Thursday, Iranian media carried contradictory reports on Vahidi meeting with Pakistan's interior minister in Tehran, who carried a message regarding negotiations with the U.S. and met with other top Iranian officials.
A longtime veteran of the ruling system, Vahidi helped shape Iran’s support of militant groups across the region, is accused of a role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Argentina, and in 2022, led domestic security forces in a bloody crackdown on protesters.
Elevated to Guard commander this year after his predecessor was killed early in the war, he leads the most powerful force in Iran, with its arsenal of ballistic missiles and its fleet of small boats threatening Persian Gulf shipping.
“Vahidi and members of his inner circle have likely consolidated control over not only Iran’s military response in the conflict but also Iran’s negotiations policy,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said.
Iran’s war strategy has been to keep a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, blocking oil and gas exports and causing a global energy crisis. At the same time, it has struck hard against oil facilities, hotels and infrastructure in Gulf Arab nations.
In negotiations, it has held out against U.S. demands that it surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, betting that it can outlast the U.S. in the ongoing standoff and that President Donald Trump will be reluctant to resume outright war that could bring greater damage to America’s Gulf allies.
That likely reflects Vahidi’s confrontational style. “He comes from that mindset of unending revolution, unending resistance,” said Kenneth Katzman, a senior fellow at the The Soufan Group, a New York-based think tank. Vahidi believes “the U.S. needs to be challenged at every turn,” said Katzman, a senior Iran expert who advised the U.S. Congress for over 30 years.
Vahidi boasted in January that Iran’s defense power has developed to make it a “high risk for any military action by an enemy.”
Pakistan hosted talks in April between an Iranian delegation, led by parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf and an American one, headed by U.S. Vice President JD Vance. But it ended without any deal.
Qalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi returned home to face criticism from inside the theocracy suggesting they were too willing to make concessions. Qalibaf had to insist publicly that the talks had the support of the supreme leader.
Since then, Vahidi has become the main point of contact for those negotiating with Iran, said a regional official with direct knowledge of the mediation. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive diplomacy.
The extreme seclusion and unknown condition of the supreme leader have fueled speculation about jockeying among leaders for access to Khamenei and influence over him. In early May, President Masoud Pezeshkian, who many see as sidelined from influence by the Guard, went out of his way to say he “got to see our dear leader” and spoke to him for around two hours.
But Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said it’s likely the new supreme leader “is in lockstep with a more hard-line (Guard) — similar to his father, but in a more emboldened and uncompromising form.”
Analyst Kamran Bokhari wrote that figures like Vahidi “are not just managing war — they are actively reshaping succession, consolidating authority around a weakened supreme leader, and effectively ‘capturing’ the state through crisis governance.”
Born Ahmad Shahcheraghi in Iran’s southern city of Shiraz in 1958, Vahidi like many young men after the 1979 revolution joined the Revolutionary Guard and fought against the invasion by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein that sparked a bloody, eight-year war.
Vahidi entered the Guard’s nascent intelligence arm and soon was overseeing operations outside Iran. He gained the favor of powerful patrons, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a later president. Rafsanjani said in his autobiography that Vahidi was involved in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration sold weapons to Tehran in an effort to free hostages held by Iranian-backed militants in Lebanon. The U.S. later used the money from those sales to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Rafsanjani later intervened to protect Vahidi when then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sought to prosecute members of the Guard who failed to stop an incursion by armed fighters from an Iranian exile group in the late 1980s during the war.
Around this time, Vahidi took over the newly formed Quds, or Jerusalem, Force. Over decades, the Quds Force helped create a network of proxy militant groups and allied governments around the Middle East. The Quds Force under Vahidi helped mastermind the 1994 bombing targeting Argentina’s largest Jewish community center, killing 85 people and wounding 300 others, prosecutors say. Iran has denied involvement.
American investigators also believe that under Vahidi, Iran organized the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. service members and wounding hundreds. Tehran has denied being involved in that attack as well.
Vahidi left the Quds Force in 1998. In 2010, while he was defense minister, the United States imposed sanctions on him over alleged involvement in Iran’s nuclear program and its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
More recently, as interior minister, Vahidi oversaw police units involved in a bloody, monthslong crackdown on protests over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested for not properly wearing the mandated headscarf to the liking of authorities.
An Iranian newspaper later published a classified document that showed Vahidi’s Interior Ministry ordered security agencies to monitor and photograph women not wearing the hijab, something he had denied was taking place.
At around that time, Vahidi said in public comments that calls to remove the hijab were a “colonial plan” by Iran’s enemies trying to undermine the Islamic Republic. “The hijab has been a big barrier against the progress of effete Western culture,” he said.
Vahidi’s role makes reaching an accord with Iran that much more difficult for the U.S. — as does the continued obscurity over Iran’s leadership.
Trump wants a single interlocutor in Iran for negotiations, but "the whole system has changed,” said Hamidreza Azizi, an Iran expert at the Middle East Institute.
“It is not a one-man show. Vahidi is one alongside others," Azizi said. "Some we know and some we don’t know.”
Associated Press writers Samy Magdy in Cairo, Sarah El Deeb in Beirut, and Amir Vahdat and Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.
FILE - Motorbikes drive past a billboard showing the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the U.S. and Israel strikes on Feb. 28, in downtown Tehran, Iran, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi, File)
FILE - Nominee for defense minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi delivers a speech to parliament on the qualification of proposed ministers of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Tehran, Iran, Sept. 1, 2009. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi, File)
FILE - A woman holds up pictures of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, left, and his father, the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during a state-organized rally in Tehran, Iran, April 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi, File)
FILE - Iran's Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi briefs the media on elections in Tehran, Iran, March 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi, File)
