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These 5 VCs have high hopes for cannabis in 2021

Cannabis has always been essential to some. While it had seemed to start last year in a bit of a correction, demand for it during the pandemic (and its widespread designation as an essential business), created a breakthrough for the industry. We saw early signs of that in our cannabis investor survey back in May of 2020.

Today, TechCrunch has surveyed five key investors who touch different aspects of the cannabis business, based on our TechCrunch List of top investors who founders recommend to us, and other sources. We asked these investors the same six questions, and each provided similar thoughts, but different approaches. Despite remaining headwinds, the future is looking up for most cannabis businesses, according to these investors.

Morgan Paxhia, managing director of Poseidon Investment Management, put it this way: “2021 could be nothing short of amazing for our industry. We expect capital flows to pick up massively from pent-up demand, good public markets bringing more IPOs, lots of M&A and new innovative startups coming on scene. We see opportunity with social equity for the first time, driven by private markets rather than poorly constructed regulations. It’s going to be fun!”

Morgan Paxhia, managing director, Poseidon Investment Management

2020 was a blockbuster year for cannabis. What advice are you giving your portfolio companies entering 2021?

Typical mantra for us, stay focused. Markets, deals and valuations are volatile in our industry but we all have to do our best to tune out the noise and focus. I’d say a great example of a team with focus is GTI. They have executed against a strategy while many of their supposed peers have done very irrational deals, impaired shareholder value, etc. GTI continues to march down its path and their results are showing.

How is COVID-19 changing the cannabis landscape?

2020 was an inward-facing year as most companies could not travel, capital was tight and macro was uncertain. This inward work has led to a lot of fundamental improvements for operators. There are others that got one last puff of wind but their businesses are too impaired and will continue to fall to the wayside.

2021 could be nothing short of amazing for our industry. We expect capital flows to pick up massively from pent-up demand, good public markets bringing more IPOs, lots of M&A and new innovative startups coming on scene. We see opportunity with social equity for the first time, driven by private markets rather than poorly constructed regulations. It’s going to be fun!

From retail to SaaS to research, there’s a lot of inroads to investing in cannabis. What sector of the business do you see has the best opportunity for growth in 2021?

We are bullish on select state markets. For example, new adult-use markets in NJ and AZ and existing markets with new growth prospects opening in CA and NY.

SaaS could get very interesting as there are several players reaching scale that are garnering mainstream attention.
International opportunity is mostly Mexico. It is the largest federally legal market that will just be opening in 2021. Many have not taken this one seriously but we have and are very proud of the efforts that went to moving such a monumental step forward.

The history of drug enforcement in the United States has been deeply unjust and racist; as we enter a period of growing legalization, are there things that startups and investors can do to address that inequity?

The industry, meaning established companies, entrepreneurs and investors need to drive solutions here. Regulations have been terrible and only exacerbate the issue. We have been putting a lot of thought into this area for years, watching various aspects such as the missteps taken by government and the unfortunate poor intentions from supposed investors.

We see a path emerging here that is collaborative, simple and should be attractive to capital providers. Stay tuned.

Who are some leaders in the cannabis space — companies, founders, growers?

  • My sister Emily is a co-founder and rock star! She is a true leader in this space on so many levels.
  • Ahmer Iqbal, CEO of Sublime — Ahmer took the role at a very challenging time and with very little capital was able to rebuild the company into a leader in the CA market.
  • Jason Wild — Not only is he a savvy investor, he puts his money where his mouth is. Outside of Poseidon, I do not know any other person in this industry that puts up so much of their own money into what they believe in.
  • Coleman Beale, CEO of Bastcore — If you are not familiar with the industrial hemp renaissance in the U.S., look no further. This technology-driven hemp-processing company is rejuvenating textiles in the U.S., using domestically grown hemp and processing for uses in such textiles as denim.

E-commerce infrastructure startup Nacelle closes $18M Series A

Consumer online shopping habits have led to a windfall of revenues for these web storefronts, but COVID-era trends have also breathed new life into the market for developer tools that help e-commerce sites operate more smoothly for shoppers.

LA-based Nacelle is one of many e-commerce infrastructure startups to earn attention from investors amid COVID.

The web services company helps streamline the backends of e-commerce websites with a so-called “headless” platform that shifts how the front end of websites interact with content in the back end. The startup claims its tech can boost performance, promote better scalability, cut down on hosting costs and offer developers a more streamlined experience.

Nacelle has closed an $18 million Series A led by Inovia with participation from Accomplice, Index Ventures, High Alpha, Silas Capital and Lerer Hippeau. The company just closed a $4.8 million seed round in mid-2020, the speedy pace of their Series A’s close seems to speak to the investor enthusiasm that has deepened around companies operating in the e-commerce world.

“It’s not secret that commerce has done well during COVID,” CEO Brian Anderson tells TechCrunch. “Not only did we get this subtle structural change with COVID that I believe is long-lasting, but merchants have been focusing more on performance.”

One of the startup’s central points of focus has been ensuring that they can bring customers onboard its platform without causing undue headaches. It can be “very painful to migrate data” with other services, Anderson says. The company’s service is “anti-rip-and-replace,” meaning potential customers can integrate “without having to be rebuild their stores.”

The firm’s customer base is largely made up of small- to medium-sized e-commerce sites. Nacelle works closely with agencies for customer referrals, also tapping on Anderson’s past contacts from his days running a Shopify Plus agency.

This past August, data from IBM’s U.S. Retail Index suggested that pandemic trends had accelerated the consumer shift from primarily visiting to physical stores to shopping on e-commerce storefronts by roughly five years.

Gett raises $115M for its on-demand ride-hailing platform for business users

As ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft continue to find their feet in a new landscape for transportation services — where unessential travel is being actively discouraged in many markets and people remain concerned about catching the coronavirus in restricted, shared spaces — a smaller player that has carved out a place for itself targeting business users is announcing more funding.

Gett, which started out as a more direct competitor to the likes of Uber and Lyft but now focuses mainly on ground transportation services for business clients in major cities around the world, said in a short statement that it has closed a round of $115 million. The company — co-headquartered in London and Israel — also said it is now “operationally profitable” and is hitting its budget targets.

The funding is being led by new backer Pelham Capital Investments Ltd. and also included participation from unnamed existing investors.

Including this round, Gett has now raised $865 million, with past investors including VW, Access and its founder Len Blavatnik, Kreos, MCI and more. Gett’s last confirmed valuation was $1.5 billion, pegged to a $200 million fundraise in May 2019. It’s not talking about current valuation, or any recent customer numbers, today.

Dave Waiser, Gett’s founder and CEO, described the funding earlier today in a note to me as an extension to the company’s previous round, a $100 million equity investment that it announced in July last year.

Chairman Amos Genish, said in a statement that the funding round was oversubscribed, “which shows the market’s interest in our platform and long-term vision. Gett is disrupting and transforming a fragmented market delivering ever-critical cost optimisation and client satisfaction.”

The company has been building out a focus on the B2B market for several years now — a smart way of avoiding the expensive and painful race to compete like-for-like against the Ubers of the world — and this most recent round is focused on doubling down on that.

The Gett of the past — it was originally founded in 2010 under the name GetTaxi — did indeed try to build a business around both consumers and higher-end users, but the idea behind Gett today is to focus on corporate accounts.

Gett provides those businesses’ employees with a predictable and reliable app-based platform to make it easier to order car services wherever they happen to be traveling, and those businesses — which in the past would have used a fragmented mix of local services — then have a consolidated way of managing, accounting for and analysing those travel expenses. It claims to be able to save companies some 25%-40% in costs.

The company previously said that its network covered some 1,500 cities. In certain metropolitan areas like London and Moscow, Gett provides transportation services directly. In markets where it does not have direct operations (such as anywhere in the U.S., including New York), it partners with third parties, such as Lyft.

“We are on a journey to transform corporate ground travel and I’m delighted that investors find our model attractive,” Waiser said in a statement today. “This investment will allow us to further develop our SaaS technology and deepen our proposition within the corporate ground travel market.”

Updated to correct that this is an extension of the $100 million round.

Gig workers, SEIU file lawsuit alleging Prop 22 is unconstitutional

A group of rideshare drivers in California and the Service Employees International Union filed a lawsuit today alleging Proposition 22 violates California’s constitution. The goal of the suit is to overturn Prop 22, which classifies gig workers as independent contractors in California.

The suit, filed in California’s Supreme Court, argues Prop 22 makes it harder for the state’s legislature to create and enforce a workers’ compensation system for gig workers. It also argues Prop 22 violates the rule that limits ballot measures to a single issue, as well as unconstitutionally defines what would count as an amendment to the measure. As it stands today, Prop 22 requires a seven-eights legislative supermajority in order to amend the measure.

“Every day, rideshare drivers like me struggle to make ends meet because companies like Uber and Lyft prioritize corporate profits over our well-being,” Saori Okawa, a plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. “With Prop 22, they’re not just ignoring our health and safety — they’re discarding our state’s constitution. I’m joining this lawsuit because I know it’s up to the people we elect to make our laws, not wealthy executives who profit from our labor. I’m confident the court will see Prop 22 for the corporate power grab that it is, and that Prop 22 will live in infamy along with unconstitutional ballot measures like Prop 8 and Prop 187.”

This suit is the latest in a long battle between gig workers and tech companies. Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft have their eyes on pursuing Prop 22-like legislation elsewhere. Given Uber and Lyft’s anti-gig-workers-as-employees stance, it came as no surprise when Uber and Lyft separately said they would pursue similar legislation in other parts of the country and the world.

Uber, Lyft and DoorDash were not immediately available for comment. But the group behind Yes on 22, Protect App Based Jobs & Services, provided a statement to TechCrunch:

“Nearly 10 million California voters — including the vast majority of app-based drivers — passed Prop 22 to protect driver independence, while providing historic new protections,” Jim Pyatt, an Uber driver who supported Prop 22, said in a statement. “Voters across the political spectrum spoke loud and clear, passing Prop 22 in a landslide. Meritless lawsuits that seek to undermine the clear democratic will of the people do not stand up to scrutiny in the courts.”

Descript raises $30M to build the next generation of video and audio editing tools

The popularity of podcasting and online video shows no signs of slowing down, and so we continue to see a wave of creators publishing a profusion of audio and video content to fill out the airwaves. Today, a company building a platform to make that work easier and more interesting to execute is announcing a round of growth funding to double down on the opportunity.

Descript, which builds tools that let creators edit audio and video files by using, for example, natural language processing to link the content to the editing of text files, has picked up $30 million in a Series B round of funding.

Andrew Mason, the CEO and founder of the company, said in an interview that the plan will be to use the money to continue building out tools not just for mass-market and individual professional and amateur creators, but also, increasingly, organizations that might be using the tools for their own in-house video and audio needs, a use case that has definitely grown during the last year of global remote working.

“We see ourselves… as an all encompassing platform for all media needs,” Mason said.

The company had early wins by signing on customers like NPR, Pushkin Industries, VICE, The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as smaller and more modest media outfits.

Mason said that it’s also now seeing startups and bigger businesses using video for communication also adopting Descript tools, especially in cases where it makes more sense to visualize the answers, but the content could still use the ability to be edited.

“Whether it’s externally or internally, for things like bug reporting or personalized introductions or helpdesk videos, we’re seeing people using Descript for company video,” he added, “sometimes in place of something like an email.”

Spark Capital, and specifically Nabeel Hyatt (who in a past life co-founded a music games specialist, Conduit Labs, acquired by Zynga), led the round, with Andreessen Horowitz and Redpoint Ventures also participating (both backed Descript in its $15 million Series A in 2019).

A number of individuals — some investors, and some investors also famous for their own video, podcasting and publishing work — also participated this Series B, among them Devdatta Akhawe, Alex Blumberg, Jack Conte, Justine Ezarik, Todd Goldberg, Jean-Denis Greze, John Lilly, Tobi Lutke, Bharat Mediratta, Shishir Mehrotra, Casey Neistat, Brian Pokorny, Raghavendra Prabhu, Lenny Rachitsky, Naval Ravikant, Jay Simons, Jake Shapiro, Rahul Vohra, and Ev Williams.

The news comes on the heels of an eventful several months for the company. In October, Descript released its first major update to its editing suite by expanding from audio editing tools to cover video as well.

In an interview last week, Mason said that the feedback so far has been “excellent” for the technology, although he is declined to say how many users or usage Descript has had for this or its older audio technology.

Descript’s move expanding into the newer medium, in any case, makes a lot of sense, when you consider how closely aligned a lot of audio-based podcasting content has been with corresponding videos — with many of the most popular podcasters often posting videos of their recordings on YouTube and other platforms, for those who prefer to watch as well as listen to recordings.

It helps, too, that video is highly monetizable. Podcasting is on track to make more than $1 billion in ad revenues in the U.S. in 2021, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Meanwhile, even in a year that was considered a downturn, digital video pulled in more than $22 billion.

That double-platform approach, however, has largely been executed on auto pilot up to now, as Mason points out, describing a lot of the video as “window dressing.”

“We watch a lot of video and podcasts and think about how we can create a tool that makes it fun and easy to craft great content,” Mason said. “One thing we’ve observed is that a remarkable amount of video is just audio with window dressing. You don’t notice it until you start looking through that lens. A ton of video is about what is happening with the audio, and so a lot of that video is just filler.”

A lot of the editing is no more than a series of jump cuts, he said, and notwithstanding other challenges like bad equipment, it’s just not a very exciting experience.

That lays the groundwork for Descript not just to create tools to make it easier to edit but in the future to conceive of how to do so in a way that creates a better and potentially more original product at the end of the process, too.

Mason’s turn to audio-based services for his two past startups — prior to Descript, he founded and eventually sold (to Bose) an audio-based city guide service called Detour — has been something of a left turn for a man probably still better known as the quirky co-founder of the once wildly popular sales platform Groupon.

However, Mason studied music at university and it is more than obvious that audio and sound-based experiences — not just music but the impact that aural experiences can have — are really where his passion lies.

Mason is long gone from Groupon, but he remains a bit of a wag. He is quick to quip that his ability to raise money for completely different concepts that are a world away from e-commerce are in no smart part due to his having already won the “startup lottery”.

And yes, like many jokes, it’s a telling and often true term, in my experience and observation. But in this case, I’d say it undersells some of the really interesting innovations that Descript has built and is building.

More generally audio technology is not only proving to be in demand with customers, but (as it happens) it is also being sought out larger tech companies, including (most recently) Amazon, Spotify, Apple, Google and Facebook, which are picking up a lot of smaller audio startups in their own efforts to build out their bigger media business.

And this at the heart of why Descript has attracted this latest round of investment.

“We’ve been convinced of machine learning’s power to be used as a creative tool for some time,” Hyatt at Spark noted to me. “Descript is perhaps the best example of that in a startup today. The company takes some very complicated technology, but presents it in a way that’s actually easier to use than the status quo products. It’s very rare that you come across a company that uses technology to both empower a creative professional to work ten times faster, and simultaneously makes the creative process ten times easier for an amateur, growing the addressable market. Anyone editing audio or video, which is most of us nowadays, can see the benefits.”