Connected Cannabis Co. was founded in 2009 and has since grown to become a leading cultivator of designer cannabis strains. Today, the company announced $30 million in debt and equity financing. This comes after the company raised a $25 million Series A in 2019. The new round was led by existing investors including Navy Capital and One Tower Group. Emerald Park Capital, an affiliate of Bryant Park Capital, and Presidio View Capital also participated.
Currently, Connected Cannabis Co. operates cultivation and retail facilities in California and Arizona. With the additional financing, it intends to expand elsewhere. The company says it plans on focusing on states with robust cannabis cultures and promising outlook for growth such as Nevada and Michigan.
“We’re thrilled to bring Emerald Park Capital and Presidio into the Connected family and welcome back our long-term partners that have supported our company’s mission from the very beginning,” said Sam Ghods, CEO of Connected. “We are steadfast in our development of new, best-in-class genetics and our production of top-quality flower that has resulted in impressive growth and unwavering customer loyalty. That same commitment and quality that we’ve prided ourselves on from day one will stay with us as we enter additional states. We look forward to bringing our true product and brand to consumers in new markets – that is our highest priority every time we look at expansion.”
Connected Cannabis is among a growing number of cannabis-focused companies amassing a war chest ahead of expanding outside of select regions. As more states in the United States legalize cannabis, more companies are exploring expansion options. Strict federal regulations often slow the process and make it cumbersome for cultivators like Connected to operate in different states, which often have different regulations and federal law prohibits interstate commerce.
Growing cannabis is easy. The plant is hardy is hearty and forgiving. Growing cannabis at scale is anything but hearty and forgiving, which is why Connected turned to additional funding to fuel its national growth.
Offering a respite from processed foods for the richest 20% of Americans, Simple Feast has landed on U.S. shores with a mission to expand its presence on the back of $45 million in financing from investors.
The European startup is looking to take a page from the shouty LIVEKINDLY Collective playbook and take on the U.S. market with gourmet prepared meals that come with a gourmet price tag and a mission to make Americans eat less meat by proffering more tasty and delicious vegetarian options.
It’s a strategy that netted LIVEKINDLY Collective’s business $335 million in a recent round of funding, making it one of the most well capitalized new entrants in the vegetarian food brand category.
“There’s a general health problem that’s coming mostly from what we put in our mouth,” said Jakob Jønck, the company’s co-founder and chief executive.
For folks in the U.S. who can afford it, Simple Feast is offering packaged meal kits with menus developed by chefs from some of the world’s highest end restaurants — place like French Laundry in California or Noma in Norway, where meals can run roughly $350 per-person.
A selection of three prepared meals for two-to-three people will run customers around $98 per-week and for a family of four or five that number jumps to $159 per-week.
Simple Feast’s foray into the US market represents just a small portion of the company’s total offerings. In the Nordic region the company offers about 30 different products all targeting people who want to reduce the amount of meat they eat.
Investors certainly love the company’s offering, because, as Jønck says, the products probably represent the highest margin in the meal kit category.
Those financiers include firms like the European venture capitalists Balderton Capital and Kinnevik, and New York-based 14W.
As for the company’s customers, they’re mostly moms with kids whose income puts them in the top 20% of the population. While they may be far more wealthy than the hoi polloi, Jønck said they still suffer from exposure to the worst aspects of America’s industrial food machine — highly processed foods that are causing an explosion in chronic health conditions like diabetes and obesity.
Data from places like the Rand Institute indicate that in America, the burden of insufficient nutrition and the chronic conditions that stem from that are disproportionately affecting low income and middle income families.
Health is a problem in the U.S. with $794 billion per year estimated to be lost in productivity between 2016 and 2030. An article from HealthAffairs cited research from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies estimates stating that health inequities and premature death cost the US economy $309.3 billion a year.
However, these costs are primarily born by the poorest Americans, particularly minorities. “People of color face higher rates of diabetes, obesity, stroke, heart disease, and cancer than whites,” the HealthAffairs article says.
Simple Feast is working to correct that, says Jønck. The company’s European packaged prepared meals available in retail stores cost around $15, he said, and the company will offer salaries far above the minimum wage in the U.S. to do its part in ameliorating some of the wealth disparity in the country.
“This is a general play on an industry that needs to change for the ground up. This system needs to change,” Jønck said.
Wire, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app and service, has raised a $21 million Series B funding round led by UVC Partners. As the company said a couple of years ago, the company is focusing on the enterprise market more than ever.
While Wire started as a consumer app, it never managed to attract hundreds of millions of customers like other messaging apps. That doesn’t mean that Wire is a bad product.
The app lets you securely talk with other people using text messages, photos, videos and voice messages. You can also start a video call and send files with other users. Wire supports both one-to-one conversations as well as rooms.
Everything is end-to-end encrypted by default, which means that the company can’t decrypt your conversations, can’t hand them over to a court or can’t expose your conversations to a potential hacker. You can also view the source code on GitHub.
In 2019, the company told TechCrunch that it would open a holding company in the U.S. to raise some funding. The idea was to double down on enterprise customers to find a clear path toward profitability. And this focus hasn’t changed since then.
“If I think back on the evolution of the business – three years ago we had zero revenue and zero customers – whereas today we’re announcing a B round and we have clearly established a well-recognised enterprise brand amongst the likes of Gartner, which is one of the things I am extremely proud of,” Wire’s CEO Morten Brogger told me.
“I also think that with the focus on a revenue-generating, enterprise business, we avoid situations like WhatsApp, where the only model you can ultimately turn to is monetising data,” he added.
And it seems to be working well when it comes to revenue growth. Right now, Wire has 1,800 customers. The number of customers has increased by almost 50% over the past year.
The company focuses on large customers, such as big corporations and government customers with a ton of potential users. Five G7 governments are currently using Wire. Overall, revenue has tripled in 2020.
In addition to working on Messaging Layer Security (MLS), Wire has been focused on improving conference calls and real-time interactions. The company believes messaging apps and real-time collaboration apps are slowly converging. And the startup wants to offer a service that works well across various scenarios.
You can also expect more end-to-end encrypted services in the collaboration space. Wire is still relatively small with 90 employees, which means it has room to grow and iterate.