Marijuana Tracking Goes Corporate

The lawful marijuana business topped $2 billion in U.S. sales in 2014, as Washington joined Colorado in legalizing recreational pot purchases. Soon it’ll also be legal to buy for fun in Oregon and Alaska, on top of the 19 states (plus Washington, D.C.) where it’s legal only for medical purposes. The market will likely reach $3.1 billion this year, estimates industry publication the Marijuana Business Factbook 2015. The weakest link in the supply chain has been the software designed to index and track licensed pot farmers’ plants to make sure none go missing on their way from grow room to blunt. That requires effectively tracking the bar codes or radio-signal tags affixed to the plants, as well as making sure the data can be exported to business software such as Excel and QuickBooks.

In the past year, companies such as BioTrackTHC and MJ Freeway have begun to emerge as leaders in the cannabis-software market, having developed systems to follow a grower’s inventory down to the milligram. Both charge monthly fees for their cloud or onsite software, and they’re starting to battle each other in earnest for contracts with growers and the state regulatory agencies that monitor them. “People don’t want to be seen as shady, barely legalized drug dealers anymore,” says Patrick Vo, BioTrack’s co-chief executive officer. “They want to be seen as credible.”