When pot and tech collide

What do you get when you combine pot and techies? (No, not a late night Doritos-driven coding session.) It’s a whole new startup industry that’s blossoming in Seattle.

The Emerald City is already known for being fertile ground for tech startups. With the growing recreational and medicinal cannabis industries getting off the ground, we’re seeing the tech and marijuana markets colliding in new and very interesting ways.

Cy Scott is one of the co-founders of Leafly, a website that allows users to rate and review pot strains and dispensaries. Scott says the seed for Leafly was planted while he was working at Kelly Blue Book, a website that allows users to rate and review cars.

But, when he and his partners tried to get Leafly off the ground, it took years before they could get any funding.

“Unbelievably difficult,” Scott recalled. “We were pitching to traditional institutional investors, and while all our numbers looked really good … because we were in the cannabis industry, it kind of spooked them at the time.”

That was five years ago. They’ve recently sold Leafly for an undisclosed amount of money, and they’re working on a new cannabis startup. This one targets marijuana analytics. It’s called Headset, and Scott says this time funding has been no problem.

“There’s definitely more capitol in the marketplace at this point for cannabis,” Scott said. “I think more people are open to investing. Definitely, it’s a different world than what it was five years ago.”

Scott credits changing public opinion. He also believes that as more states legalize recreational and medicinal marijuana, more investors will want to get in on the industry.

Market analytics is nothing new. There are a lot of very large companies that work specifically on creating systems for different industries to keep track of their products, their clients, and other information.

Scott says marijuana is a totally different animal largely because of the fact that only a few states have legalized marijuana. Each state has different rules for the industry that can be difficult for large companies to deal with.

Headset can be more nimble. It also helps that they’re already familiar with the market.

“We think that these big players will want to get involved in the near future, as more states continue to legalize and more laws are passed.”

By then Scott hopes Headset will have a head start in the latest offshoot of the new legal marijuana industry.

And, who knows. With his entrepreneurial spirit, Scott might already be on to the next project.

Whatever he ends up working on, Scott has a strong foothold in aiding marijuana manufacturers, processors, retailers and users.

With the overlap of the technology and marijuana industries in the Puget Sound region, Scott says there’s no better place than Seattle to do business.