Wurk is accelerating its mission to help cannabis companies all over the country following its newly secured $11 million raise. Poseidon Asset Management and Arcadian Fund led the round with participation from Altitude, Salveo Capital, Phyto Partners and The Arcview Group — all repeat investors.
The Denver-based company, founded in 2015, offers cannabis companies of all sizes a human capital management platform that helps them streamline business and comply with the wide-ranging and ever-changing regulations around marijuana. By offering services that include payroll, hiring, HR and tax compliance, as well as banking and accounting guidance, Wurk aims to free up time for cannabis companies to focus on their product rather than sometimes-hazy administration.
"Multiple new states came online in 2018, and with a number of markets planning to implement a regulated cannabis program this year, the industry needs these critical business applications in place to support it at scale,” said Founder and CEO Keegan Peterson in a statement.
Wurk's solution helps ease that massive compliance burden and creates a huge investment opportunity in doing so."
Wurk’s raise will be used to invest in the launch of a managed services initiative, which will grant users access to a dedicated team of human resource, payroll and tax experts in addition to use of the overall platform. The core employee management suite will see upgrades, and Wurk will also implement an analytics engine to give customers insight into how they’re performing against common benchmarks within the industry.
“We regularly see the HR, accounting and tax challenges that startups in the industry face on a frequent basis,” said Emily Paxhia, managing partner at Poseidon Asset Management, in the statement. “Wurk's solution helps ease that massive compliance burden and creates a huge investment opportunity in doing so."
To date, the company has raised just over $7 million, with over half of that being earned in the last year. The company was recently featured in our 50 Startups to Watch list for 2019, and this funding is proof as to why.
