 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Financial technology |
| Founded | 2013 |
| Headquarters | Los Angeles |
Key people | David Dinenberg, Founder |
| Website | KIND Financial |
KIND Financial is an American start-up focused on providing financial technology services for the cannabis industry. [1] KIND would fail to launch, with CEO and founder David Dinenberg departing the company on May 4, 2023. [2]
In 2013, David Dinenberg founded Kind Banking to be the "Wells Fargo of the marijuana banking industry" [3] before changing the name of the company to Kind Financial in late 2014. [4] [5] Dinenberg also serves as CEO of KIND, [6] [7] [8] which has its headquarters in Los Angeles, California. [9]
KIND's technology platform seeks to provide tools focused on cannabis tracking and compliance for cultivators, dispensaries, and regulatory agencies in the cannabis industry. These tools are said to manage the entire cannabis business life-cycle and keep transactions safe, secure and compliant with rules, regulations, laws and guidelines with the federal guidelines set forth by FinCEN.
KIND's seed-to-sale tracking and compliance platform, Agrisoft Seed to Sale, [10] integrates with KIND's cash-management and order-taking kiosk as well as KIND Pay. Together, the KIND platform should provide a way to close the loop between marijuana-related businesses and financial institutions. [11]
KIND quickly grew a prestigious investor portfolio, mostly from Dinenberg's native Philadelphia, consisting of venture capitalist Wayne Kimmel, singer-songwriter John Legend, film producer Mike Jackson, Eagles running back Brian Westbrook, the heiress of Ed Snider's, the original owner of the Philadelphia Flyers, fortune Lindy Snider, tennis player Andy Roddick, 76ers manager Billy King, Philadelphia Inquirer executive Greg Liss, and model and actress Brooklyn Decker. [2]
On June 17, 2016, Microsoft announced its partnership with KIND. [12] Namely that KIND was going to seek government clients in states where marijuana sales were legal.
Despite cash support from a Texan bank, Oklahoman investment fund, and several cannabis companies, KIND stalled namely due to the extra costs required to overcome federal bureaucracy. [2] KIND stopped updating its investors on its financial statements and tax records, and on May 4, 2023, founder and CEO David Dinenberg left the company. [2]
Dinenberg blamed the failure of KIND to launch due to the lack of word of mouth advertising from its investors, his own legal troubles and $700,000 in court ordered restitution, and the 2008 Great Recession. [2] KIND's investors retorted that Dinenberg failed to disclose his legal troubles and was mismanaging company funds. [2]
Despite the departure of Dinenberg the company's investors attempted to re-launch as an app where users can purchase cannabis products. [2] This effort to relaunch is being headed by Snider and Liss, who announced that they were actively looking for a new CEO as of September 28, 2023. [2] Since Dinenberg's departure, KIND's website has been "down for maintenance" with the text "Don't be sad that it's gone, be happy that it happened" displayed across their homepage.
Intuit Inc. is an American multinational business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparation application TurboTax, personal finance app Mint, the small business accounting program QuickBooks, the credit monitoring service Credit Karma, and email marketing platform Mailchimp. As of 2019, more than 95% of its revenues and earnings come from its activities within the United States.
WeedMaps is a tech company serving the cannabis industry, founded in 2008 by Justin Hartfield and Keith Hoerling.
The National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA) is an American non-profit organization based in the District of Columbia, with an additional office in Denver, Colorado. NCIA is the largest cannabis trade association in the U.S. and the only organization representing state-sanctioned cannabis-related businesses at the federal level. Its mission is "to promote the growth of a responsible and legitimate cannabis industry and work for a favorable social, economic and legal environment for that industry in the United States." The organization was founded in late 2010 and has been described as the "first national trade group for the cannabis industry" in the United States.
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.
Ghost Management Group, LLC is a technology company based in Irvine, California. that has a portfolio of advertising, web, point of sale and logistics software.
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.
MedMen Enterprises is a United States-based cannabis company with operations in California, Nevada, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts. MedMen owns and operates 29 retail stores and 6 cultivation facilities and is currently licensed to expand its footprint to 65 retail locations. Its stock trades on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the ticker symbol MMEN. MedMen is also traded over-the-counter in the United States under the ticker symbol MMNFF. MedMen is based in Culver City, California and has more than 1,000 employees.
Canopy Growth Corporation, formerly Tweed Marijuana Inc., is a cannabis company based in Smiths Falls, Ontario.
Chuck Rifici is a Canadian entrepreneur, former CEO of Tweed Marijuana Inc, and former CFO of the Liberal Party of Canada. He has been tagged "the godfather of Canadian weed".
Wikileaf Technologies is a Seattle business providing data services to the cannabis industry and information to consumers. The company provides price indexes and cannabis strain reviews and information.
David Dinenberg is an American business executive best known as the founder and former CEO of KIND Financial.
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.
Women have been active in the cannabis industry, cannabis legalization, cannabis testing, and cannabis rights since the earliest days of commercialization, but they have also faced gendered obstacles impeding their growth in an industry worth over 12 million dollars since 2019. "The American cannabis industry accounted for $10 billion of 2018’s [global] figures, with the average U.S. dispensary pulling in $3 million a year."
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.
Tokken is a payment system and mobile app most known for being a legal and secure option for businesses transactions within the cannabis industry, because of its compliance with bank requirements. The startup company was created by Lamine Zarrad, a former regulator at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
Hypur is a Scottsdale-based payment and banking technology platform that was built to enable financial institutions to responsibly and sustainably bank highly regulated industries, such as cannabis.
The Green Rush (2012–present) is an ongoing global economic event that began on December 6, 2012, when cannabis was legalized in the US state of Washington; Colorado's legalization took effect four days later. While still illegal federally in the United States, the actions of these two state governments signaled the opening of a market projected to be worth US$48+ billion globally by 2027. As of 2019 the cannabis industry had created over 250,000 jobs. However, cannabis companies have been a mixed investment success, with many experiencing plunging stock prices, massive layoffs, and failure to meet investor expectations.
The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the cannabis industry. Investor's Business Daily said the industry was affected as "customers stock up on prescriptions and recreational customers load up on something to make the lockdown a little more mellow or a little less boring".
Giadha Aguirre DeCarcer is an Italian-born American entrepreneur. She is the CEO and cofounder of CTrust, which provides financing advice and data analysis to participants in the cannabis market. From 2014 to 2021 she was the founder and CEO, then Executive Chair, of New Frontier Data, a big data and analytics reporting provider in the cannabis industry.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-36545858