Pistil Data, a cannabis market intelligence platform, has closed a $6.5 million seed round led by Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde. The funding round included participation from JW Partners and other entrepreneurs. Pistil Data makes market intelligence accessible to cannabis brands and organizes billions of data points to provide customized sales opportunities for cannabis brands.
The San Francisco-based company’s co-founders, Jeffery Graham and Taylor Jones, launched the platform nine months ago. Since then, Pistil Data has built a client base including Connected, Curaleaf, Herbl and Raw Garden.
“My entry point into cannabis was as head of business intelligence for a large West Coast cannabis brand. I saw how they struggled to keep track of sales opportunities, and how everyone was maintaining their own personal spreadsheet,” Pistil Data CEO Jeffrey Graham told TechCrunch. “We lost deals as a result of the confusion. Pistil was born out of trying to make things easier for companies like them by redefining the relationship cannabis brands have with data.”
Graham says that he and Jones were able to home in on one of the most pressing problems that brands face, which is a lack of access to market intelligence. The pair believed that this gap was stifling growth and limiting efficiency for cannabis brands.
“The cannabis industry is extremely complex and fragmented, and there is almost no industry standardization of products or retailers. Our technology analyzes and organizes billions of data points every day to provide customized sales opportunities for cannabis brands,” Graham said.
Pistil Data now aims to help cannabis brands find the next chance to sell their products at a retail store or to get reorders from current accounts. It also aims to make it easier for cannabis brands of all sizes to find new sales opportunities. Since its launch, the platform has signed up nearly 100 cannabis companies in California and Colorado. Graham also notes that more than 600 sales representatives use the service every week.
Regarding the seed funding, Pistil Data plans to use it to accelerate its nationwide expansion and launch new market intelligence products for brands and retailers.
“We invested in Pistil because its unique technology provides immediate ROI to its client,” said Yoni Meyer, a partner at Casa Verde, in a statement. ”The company’s growth trajectory, coupled with its stellar leadership, puts Pistil on track to be the preeminent data platform in cannabis.”
In terms of the future, Graham stated that the company’s “vision is to help every business in cannabis find new opportunities to grow. We want to address the challenges the entire industry has faced around data. We think that our platform can ultimately be the connective tissue for the global cannabis industry.”
Graham said that Pistil Data’s emergence in the cannabis industry is akin to the impact that Bloomberg’s data platform had on the financial industry. He noted that the company triggers a similar critical turning point for the cannabis industry.
“When Bloomberg took Wall Street out of manual analysis, spreadsheets and human error, it unlocked growth for the entire financial services sector. Every transformative industry has needed a company to organize its data and unlock exponential growth. Pistil is a similar positive and progressive disruptor that will directly impact the maturation of the cannabis industry as it grows into a major global industry.”
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