Canopy Boulder grads offer solutions for cannabis industry

BOULDER — The six latest graduates of Canopy Boulder, an accelerator focused on startups with solutions for the cannabis industry, pitched their ideas as part of their Boulder Startup Week Demo Day.

The new startups in the latest of 80 companies Canopy has worked with and 100 investments it’s made, include the latest round of funding for Canopy graduate BDS Analytics from its VC arm, CanopyVentures.

The companies were:

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• Best in Grow, which collects data on budtender recommendations to customers in store and analyzes it for brands so they have market insight into what consumers desire. That data is currently collected in unwieldy spreadsheets and printed, but can now be accessed by cannabis brands in Best in Grow’s online portal.

• Hello People Ops, which provides human-resource expertise to the cannabis industry, which often doesn’t have access to information such as policy templates, crisis management, organizational development and performance management.

• Miele Events, a company that is hosting the first Hosted Buyer Summit. While cannabis trade shows have gotten huge and chaotic, the Hosted Buyer Summit for the cannabis industry will have prequalified brands and retailers come together. The Miele event app will have the relevant information they need to prime their discussion so that when buyers and sellers come together, they have everything they need to negotiate in a more-controlled, business-like environment.

• Andia, which is already getting traction in other markets and is starting to work with Northrop Grumman, tested its security solution on the cannabis industry first. Andia uses a combination of biometric facial markers and blockchain to scan a person’s ID and then store data on blockchain so it is secure. The solution helps cannabis dispensaries ensure that someone isn’t going to different dispensaries and buying more than the legal amount. Andia’s scanning technology uses 50 different biometric vectors from a photo ID, but doesn’t require other information such as name or address, keeping it even more secure.

• Treatment X is creating a large database of patients’ reported reactions to medical cannabis. The goal is to help doctors and patients understand dosages, prescriptions and reactions in the medical cannabis field, which currently has very little data and a lot of variance between patients and product reactions. Treatment X incentivizes patient participation through a rewards program that gives them deals when they report results.

• Knxit is licensing Canopy’s curriculum and using it to create an online accelerator for those starting in the cannabis industry. As cannabis becomes more popular and available in states that don’t have the more established infrastructure that a state like Colorado has, an online accelerator program could help bridge the gap and help startups start strong and on the right path.