| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Venture capital |
| Founded | Irvine, California (2012) |
| Founder | Justin Hartfield Doug Francis |
| Headquarters | , |
 | This article may contain an excessive number of citations . The details given are: improve reference.(May 2020) |
Ghost Management Group, LLC is a technology company based in Irvine, California. [1] [2] [3] that has a portfolio of advertising, web, point of sale and logistics software.
The firm was founded in 2012 by Justin Hartfield and Doug Francis. [4] [5] [6] [7]
Ghost Group targets accredited businesses and investors that are either already involved or have shown interest in becoming involved in the legal cannabis industry. [3] [8]
In June 2013 the firm announced the launch of Emerald Ocean Capital fund. [2] [9] [3] [10] [11] The market of consumer-facing products, especially software and technologies, will be the focus of Emerald Ocean. [9] [3] [4] [12] After announcing the launch of the fund, Emerald Ocean expressed intentions of raising 10 to 25 million dollars in its first round. [2] [3]
Additionally, the capital fund will function as a venture capital incubator, with an 8,000 square foot office facility in Denver, Colorado for select startups. [2] [13]
Ghost Group concurrently announced the launch of Ghost Domain Capital, an investor in category Internet domains. [1] [10] [11] [12]
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are often from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
The Emerald Triangle is a region in Northern California, named as such due to it being the largest cannabis-producing region in the United States. The region includes three counties in an upside-down triangular configuration:
Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California which specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. As of 2022, the firm had approximately US$85 billion in assets under management.
Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Since its founding in 1996, the firm has invested in a number of companies and raised approximately $5.6 billion. Index Venture partners appear frequently on Forbes’ Midas List of the top tech investors in Europe and Israel.
Corporate venture capital (CVC) is the investment of corporate funds directly in external startup companies. CVC is defined by the Business Dictionary as the "practice where a large firm takes an equity stake in a small but innovative or specialist firm, to which it may also provide management and marketing expertise; the objective is to gain a specific competitive advantage." Examples of CVCs include GV and Intel Capital.
Greycroft LP is an American venture capital firm. It manages over $2 billion in capital with investments in companies such as Bird, Bumble, HuffPost, Goop, Scopely, The RealReal, and Venmo. Greycroft was founded in 2006 by Alan Patricof, Dana Settle, and Ian Sigalow. The firm is headquartered in New York City and Los Angeles.
WeedMaps is a tech company serving the cannabis industry, founded in 2008 by Justin Hartfield and Keith Hoerling.
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With over $25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of the world's largest venture capital firms.
Leafly is a website focused on cannabis use and education. The company says it has more than 120 million annual visitors and over 10 million monthly active users. Leafly provides a wide range of information on cannabis including 1.5 million consumer product reviews, more than 9,000 cannabis articles and resources, and over 5,000 verified strains in its database. Leafly additionally provides 4,500+ retailers and 8,000+ cannabis brands with e-commerce tools such as digital storefronts, embedded menus, point-of-sale integrations, targeted advertising, and more. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington and from 2012 to 2019 was owned by Privateer Holdings, a private equity firm focused on the emerging legal cannabis industry. Leafly is now a publicly traded company with 160 employees.
Justin Hartfield is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist from Orange County, California. He is a co-founder and general partner at the Ghost Group venture capital firm and was the CEO at WeedMaps before stepping down in 2016 to pursue other ventures.
Adeo Ressi is the founder and CEO of Decile Group and Executive Chairman of Founder Institute. Decile Group is a full-stack venture capital platform for emerging managers worldwide and helped launch nearly 50% of all VC firms in 2023 with the VC Lab accelerator. Founder Institute, a pre-seed accelerator, operates chapters in over 250 cities and supports more than 7,000 portfolio companies. Ressi’s previous startups, including Methodfive, Game Trust, and Total New York, resulted in nearly $2 billion in exits by the age of 30. He has also launched 14 venture capital funds, served on the board of the X Prize Foundation, and created TheFunded.
OurCrowd is an online global venture investing platform that empowers institutions and individual accredited investors to invest and engage in emerging technology companies at an early stage while still privately held. Based in Jerusalem, the company launched in February 2013, and has since opened overseas branches in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Spain, Singapore, Brazil, and the UAE.
Bloomberg Beta is an early stage venture capital firm with $375M under management, capitalized solely by Bloomberg. The fund exists to expand Bloomberg's horizons by investing in companies built by extraordinary founders that are creating profound change in the way business operates, with a focus on machine intelligence and the future of work. Bloomberg Beta was recognized by VC review site CB Insights as the #2 investor in AI.
Women in venture capital or VC are investors who provide venture capital funding to startups. Women make up a small fraction of the venture capital private equity workforce. A widely used source for tracking the number of women in venture capital is the Midas List which has been published by Forbes since 2001. Research from Women in VC, a global community of women venture investors, shows that the percentage of female VC partners is just shy of 5 percent.
Jonathan Lacoste is a venture capitalist and software entrepreneur based in Austin, TX. He is the Founder & General Partner at Space.VC, an early-stage venture capital fund specialized on space, defense, and frontier tech investments. Notable investments have included SpaceX, True Anomaly, and Loft Orbital. Previously, Jonathan was the Co-Founder of Jebbit, an enterprise software company he co-founded in 2011 with university classmates. He and co-founder Tom Coburn ran the company for 12 years before being acquired by Vista Equity Partners.
MassRoots is a social network for the cannabis community. As of June 2016, it had an estimated 900,000 users. MassRoots for Business, the company’s advertising portal, has an estimated 1,000 clients as of June 2015. In 2014, MassRoots was one of the first cannabis-related companies to go public through a Registration Statement on Form S-1 and trades under the ticker “MSRT” and in August 2015, MassRoots submitted an application to up-list its stock to the Nasdaq.
Eaze is an American company based in San Francisco, California that launched a medical cannabis delivery app of the same name in 2014.
Alan Gertner is a Canadian. He is the old co-founder and CEO of Tokyo Smoke, a Canadian lifestyle brand that focuses on coffee, clothing and legal cannabis. Gertner who also co-founded Hiku, a Canadian company, is a former Google executive known for his work in the Canadian cannabis industry.
KushCo Holdings is an American company that sells packaging, containers, and other ancillary products for the cannabis industry. It is based in Garden Grove, California and is publicly traded on the New York OTCQB marketplace under the stock ticker symbol, KSHB.
Venture capital in Poland is a segment of the private equity market that finances early-stage high-risk companies based in Poland, with the potential for fast growth. As of March 2019, there is a total of 130 active VC firms in Poland, including local offices of international VC firms, and VC firms with mainly Polish management teams. Between 2009–2019, these entities have invested locally in over 750 companies, which gives an average of around 9 companies per portfolio. The Polish venture market accounts for 3% of the entire European ecosystem of VC investments, mainly in the digital space.