Who's going to track all that money from legal pot? Boulder-based Weave is on it

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When the state of Colorado legalized marijuana in 2012, it proved a boon to many interests: revenue-collecting city and state governments, people suffering from various medical conditions — and the tech startup economy. As delivery services, online marketplaces, review platforms, and databases arise in Denver and Boulder, opportunities for the business of pot abound.

Hence the creation of Weave, a Boulder-based service for dispensaries to track sales and their customers to browse inventory. Tapping into a young market that’s still finding its structure, Weave is designed to consolidate product information for dispensaries across the state of Colorado.

“The [cannabis] industry has a big issue with transparent information currently. Cannabis is a product that differs greatly location to location, product to product, creating a lot of ambiguity in product information,” said Christian Nitu, co-founder and CEO. “The current online and offline tools that can assist customers can be greatly improved. We were inspired to develop technology that could assist everyone with finding cannabis information reliably and quickly.”

Currently in beta, Weave is refining an analytics platform for dispensaries, focusing on “product information, trends, and inventory movement,” according to Nitu.

“We will be able to help businesses understand the product flow from shelf to customer more clearly. Some metrics we are looking to report include turnaround time for products on shelves, popular product trends, and inventory forecasting measures,” he said.
 

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Source: Twitter

Weave collects inventory data through cloud-based point of sale (POS) systems which Nitu said account for about 80 percent of the Colorado cannabis retail industry’s transactions. “We are integrated into two predominant systems in the cannabis space, and are working to integrate with more platforms in the future,” he added.

Nitu intends to leverage this technology for governmental purposes as well. Because weed is still newly legal, city and state governments must navigate and gauge its economic effects with relatively little history to inform them. According to Nitu, they haven’t yet gathered enough data to accurately forecast dispensary licenses, tax budgets, and allocation of cannabis tax revenue — a problem he anticipates Weave will alleviate.

“Colorado estimated over $90 million for tax revenue, while the actual cannabis tax revenue will come in at $72 million. Weave gathers real-time inventory information, which can be a valuable data set to pair with other data sources,” he said.

Weave’s four employees (a CTO, VP of Engineering, and VP of Design round out the company) plan to introduce the beta platform to partnered stores within the next month, Nitu said. Though they're keeping operations limited to Colorado for the near future, Nitu (who wouldn't reveal Weave’s investment total) plans to gauge the company’s national opportunities later this year.

“We’re all very passionate problem solvers,” he said, “and noticed immediately that technology could greatly benefit and impact the cannabis industry.”