Fuelled by a mission to make selling cannabis easier, market intelligence provider Pistil Data has announced a $6.5 million in seed investment from Casa Verde and other Silicon Valley investors.
Pistil, co-founded by former Google data executive Dr. Jeffrey Graham and Baker Technologies’ sales executive Taylor Jones, makes vital market intelligence accessible to cannabis brands of all sizes, helping a sector that previously has struggled with the complexity of industry data.
It was a problem Graham saw first-hand while working 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,” he says. “We lost deals as a result of the confusion. So, Pistil was born out of trying to make things easier for companies like them by redefining the relationship cannabis brands have with data.”
Every day, Pistil’s cutting-edge machine learning technology distils billions of data points to deliver sales opportunities to its nearly 100 clients in Colorado and California. The platform’s emergence represents an industry turning point by providing critical information that was previously unavailable to brands.
“We help our clients get into new stores, expand their shelf space, and get faster re-orders,” says Taylor Jones, who is now VP of Revenue and Co-founder of Pistil. “Our clients appreciate how easy and intuitive Pistil makes it to find new sales opportunities.”
Market response to Pistil’s platform has been extremely positive. In just nine months of business, the company has signed 100 brands, including such top names as Connected, Curaleaf, Herbl, and Raw Garden, as clients and now has 600+ sales reps using its platform daily to access vital market intelligence.
For an industry that up until now has been extremely fragmented, disorganized, lacking in standardization and reliant on spreadsheets, Pistil’s data intelligence is truly eye-opening and revolutionary. Explains Jeffrey Graham, “There are companies that provide high-level market research to the industry, but nobody else provides local, store-specific sales opportunities like Pistil does. The ability for brands to hone in on their respective product, location and competitive targets is what makes Pistil’s platform the first true market intelligence for cannabis.”
Early adopters of the platform can’t help but agree that Pistil’s is already making a demonstrable impact for cannabis brands.
“The platform they’ve built, and mission to help companies increase revenue and build stronger relationships with retail partners is very much in line with ours. We look forward to working with them,” says Mark Russ, President, West Region of Curaleaf.
Jeffrey Graham goes on to say that just as Bloomberg’s data platform fundamentally changed the way the financial industry accesses and uses data, Pistil’s emergence triggers a similar critical evolutionary 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. Bloomberg did it for finance. Google did it for the Internet. Now we’re going to have an equal direct impact on cannabis maturity as it grows into a major global industry.”
