There's something really disturbing about this given the fact that people are still rotting in jail in this country for selling a dime bag in the 90's. The time for federal prohibition to come to an end is far overdue.

I'm going to quibble about your word choice. There is something disturbing about the fact that people are still rotting in jail, not that Ease raised money.

Those people should not be in jail, and eaze is doing well to raise money. The former does not make the latter disturbing.

> Those people should not be in jail, and eaze is doing well to raise money. The former does not make the latter disturbing.

Yes, it does. Priorities are disturbing. This doesn't happen by chance.

The people who gave Eaze funding aren't the people who put low-level drug dealers in jail.

They might be, as there are tons of money invested into prisons: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/16/us-prisons-j...

I don't see how a company whose existence works to normalize the use of marijuana is a priority unaligned with that of decriminalizing and clemency for those incarcerated for posession.

Is that exaggerated or do you really have confirmation of somebody serving time in prison for minor pot dealings? I would be willing to be most serving time in prisons for pot were moving quite a bit of product, which would still be illegal even in legalized pot states today.

There are many cases of extended time served for small personal amounts of marijuana. Especially after "tough on crime" effort and 3-strikes laws that permeated throughout the country starting in the 90s. Obama vacated many federal sentences before his term ended, but that didn't cover prisoners in state and county prisons.

Plenty of press and articles around this over the past few years.

I think that this is true, but didn't Obama have a massive wave of Pardons of people like this before he left office?

Didn't Google invent a search engine? People are still being incarcerated for long periods of time for minor marijuana offenses (well under a pound). This isn't news.

Really not hard to see the injustices here, and if you want court documents, then you can get them. Plenty of news sources as well:

http://norml.org/laws/item/indiana-penalties-2

Maybe I'm missing something, but why are X delivery companies a thing? Why not have just a delivery company? This is a case where I can't even think of any special handling being required, but I wouldn't be a customer so may be ignorant to something.

In the case of Eaze it's delivery for a market with a very unique regulatory and logistical nature. As opposed to say, food.

I might be missing a joke, but food also has a unique regulatory and logistical nature. Amazon and Walmart.com have had trouble expanding to groceries for this very reason, and that's why they've been partnering with or acquiring grocery delivery startups.

Food essentially requires its own supply chain and has its own health regulations. Consumer preferences for food shopping also seem to be distinctly different from preferences on other classes of products.

Nobody's going to jump a Postmates delivery guy for your takeout.

A marijuana delivery guy rolling around with a significant amount of high-value product might.

Depends where and how they appear. In SF there are quite a lot of services that do this per dispensary, and I doubt they wear anything that signals to theives what they are carrying, and if they do I doubt it'll lead to that a majority of the time.

The main reason this exists in this market is due to how payments are processed. Largely, this is still an all cash business due to Federal legal status that ties the hands of most financial institutions.

Delivery is all about logistics. Each product has it's own logistics. Delivering produce is a lot different from delivering books. For the fastest delivery, you need to stock what you are delivering. This is much easier to do with a narrow product range than a broader one.

Having said that, UPS and Fedex, etc are delivery companies. I assume this company is promoting same day delivery, otherwise, why not just use a shipping company.

Believe it or not, marijuana has significant medical use, and a lot of its potential patients are mobility impaired.

How does any other delivery company willing to ferry such a product impact the patient differently?

Not sure I really buy this reasoning for the rise in cannabis startups; if you follow the logic, it should bring you to "prescription drug delivery" pretty quickly, and yet the focus is all on weed.

I am pretty sure they are focused on weed because it's an emerging market whereas the pharma delivery(which home delivery does exist) is an entrenched market with well established incumbents. also, weed doesn't require a prescription(past the doc's initial rec) like a script for pharmaceuticals does.

The main reason I think is that pharmacies are a major part of drugstores and are easily accessible whereas municipalities are free to say "I don't want any dispensaries here" so there is a vacuum of availability for many people. driving to the corner pharmacy or taking a short subway to the pharmacy is different than making a cross town trip to get the medication you need.

Of course… Many types of delivery companies already exists for specific needs. Shipping companies like UPS or the post office aren't going to bring you a pizza or deliver a shed into your backyard.

I see distinction between what I consider shipping and delivery (UPS, Fedex vs Postmates, Grubhub). But UPS/Fedex doesn't care (within laws) what you are shipping. It's not like you can be the Fedex of Birthday cards, that makes no sense but it's exactly what is happening in the delivery world.

Maybe this is natural as consumers are getting used to on demand delivery so companies need to focus on something and be known for it. But, eventually I'd expect to just have one app where I could get anything delivered without having to use app A for groceries and app B for restaurants and...

For shipping, we certainly have what you describe. Amazon and Walmart can get you about everything delivered via parcel service. The important things for that type of business are procurement, storage, and order fulfillment.

Same day delivery of a locally available product is rather different. Typically, it has been tied it to the provider of a service directly – such as FTD delivering flowers, or Pizza Hut delivering pizza. Of course this is most useful for products from companies that don't have their own local delivery service. For a third party deliverer in this local situation, warehousing and that sort of logistics is not necessary. Procurement is very different as well. How do you picture the customer ordering something? An open ended delivery service that you tell them to go anywhere in the city and bring you anything you want? That seems like a different type of business, and a somewhat risky one as well, which already exists as various courier services.

I think specialization is more likely. The value from the services is that they have a some sort of menu on an app or website that provides a consistent, curated selection of whatever product, and trusted vendors that not only do you trust, but they trust.

Anyway, the legal situation in the cannabis market illustrates the need for this specialized service to exist.

In the case of eaze, marijuana is not legal federally so you can’t use traditional postage or banks that cross state lines.

Similarly, nobody would ever ship a pizza interstate or really more than about an hour away. In the short term, I suspect cannabis will work similarly, for legal reasons as well as practicality.

In some places you can get alcohol delivered, and others, you cannot. I'm sure that as time goes on, and with federal legalization, restrictions will ease on shipping cannabis.

One thing to note is that the black market uses mail to transport cannabis in a major way… Not just the darknet vendors, but many other people. They even make rap songs about it. Home delivery of cannabis has long been popular in dense urban markets such as New York City and San Francisco, also.

Serious question: Are the investors not at risk for being charged with a federal RICO case given that marijuana is illegal at that level in the US? Legally, it's no different than them investing in a heroin or cocaine ring.

That delivery spike on 4/20 is amusing to see. I suspect it will become the equivalent of Christmas sales volume for Cannabis vendors.

Gets them another 27mo of runway, according to the other article that they burn 1m/mo. Wow, how can they be burning that much?

Doritos, I presume.

> Wow, how can they be burning that much?

In their case, "burn rate" is a good thing.

Ridiculous growth, from what I've been told.

Why would (largest regional pharmacy retailer) supply chain not be able to win this market? Already has all those hard assets in place with ops, people, efficiencies, etc.

Distribution. Many cities have different rules about if and where you can place a shop that can sells Marijuana. The corner store beside your house is not going to be selling weed anytime soon. Hence delivery is very handy.

I get the need for runway given the burn rate at 1 mil/month. I just can't understand the investors motivation. What does annual revenue really look like? Meadow raised just over 2 mil and is close to profitability. It all just seems a tad excessive in terms of cap raise, burn and realistic growth. But again, just keep raising capital, eventual you can IPO and dump it on a bunch of retail guys.

Congrats to Eaze! I run a popular networking event for CannaTech professionals in Denver and while it's a little scary to see Silicon Valley coming after this area that Colorado has been dominating, it's a good thing for the industry in general. Stigma and risk has kept a lot of top talent away and it's exciting to see that finally starting to change!

Glad to see some increasing activity for funding in the cannabis space. Prohibition is lifting, and it is exciting to watch it happen.

It's a bit surprising to see that they've raised so much. Given that Eaze is only available in California and they will need a very local approach to deal with city by city and state by state regulations which have slight differences.

I can definitely see an Uber/Lyft dynamic emerge in the marijuana delivery space.

I wonder if the increasing cannabis accessibility leads to an increase in smoking? Lots of friends of mine never smoked but started „smoking“ cannabis, usually combined with tobacco (vapors not used once). Kind of a sad development in my opinion when lots of countries are pushing hard for a smokefree life.

Can the VC be implicated for financing distribution of controlled substances ? There could be enough grounds for Banks to terminating their relationship with Bailey Capital et al. Why would a venture capital firm expose themselves to this, when its not even legal in half of the country?

>Can the VC be implicated for financing distribution of controlled substances ? There could be enough grounds for Banks to terminating their relationship with Bailey Capital et al.

Yes, and yes.

>Why would a venture capital firm expose themselves to this, when its not even legal in half of the country?

Because selling weed is basically printing money

I hope they can invest at least some of this money into 5 minute drone deliveries.

Marijuana delivery by drone is already illegal or will be in the next 5 minutes. (Which is too bad because it is a very elegant solution.)

There was a news article earlier this week IIRC that California banned marijuana delivery by drone.

High value, light weight. Sounds perfect. Customers would appreciate the Wow factor too.

Sounds perfect for intercepting!

Too loud.