Author: azeeadmin

Electric bike sales boomed in 2020, a phenomenon driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the disruption it delivered consumers’ daily lives.

Now, Rad Power Bikes is reaping those rewards and using them to double its workforce and scale globally.

The Seattle-based startup said Thursday it has raised $150 million from institutional investors including Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global Fund, Fidelity Management & Research Company, TPG’s global impact investing platform The Rise Fund and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates. Existing investors Durable Capital Partners LP and Vulcan Capital also participated in the round.

The funding round — the largest of a U.S. electric bike startup — is a validation of Rad Power’s business model and its ability to expand beyond the $100 million in sales it generated in 2019. Rad Power Bikes declined to disclose its 2020 sales numbers.

Rad Power is a direct-to-consumer electric bike seller known for creating robust products that combine features like fat tires, big batteries and motors with touchscreens and even cargo carrying capacity — all at prices hundreds of dollars below its competitors.

The company, which was founded in 2007, initially was a low-volume custom bike builder. That changed in 2015, after Rad Power founder and CEO Mike Radenbaugh teamed up with friend Ty Collins and relaunched as a direct-to-consumer business. That year, they funded the RadRover Electric Fat Tire bike through an Indigogo campaign. The company has evolved into a large-volume seller and today has 11 different bikes in its portfolio, which are sold in 30 countries.

Rad Power has added more than just bikes. The company has built out its online sales platform, pre- and post-purchase customer support teams, retail showrooms, service van and a local service partner network. The company has always been profitable even as it has expanded, Radenbaugh said.

The company has largely been bootstrapped, although it did raise a private round of a few million dollars in 2009 and a $20 million injection of capital in 2020. To date, Rad Power has raised $175 million — the vast majority of which came in this new round.

“I felt this was a special opportunity because we’re able to accelerate investments into a bunch of areas of the business where we’ve already been experimenting for years and that we found work,” Radenbaugh said.

The funds will be used to scale in just about every sector of its business, Radenbaugh said. Rad Power employs 325 people today and Radenbaugh said they plan to double the team by the end of 2021. The company also plans to add more retail showrooms and service locations, continue to add more contract manufacturers in an aim to diversify its supply chain, and add more accessories so consumers and customize their bikes.

The team that will grow the fastest is Rad Power’s research and development department, which is currently at about 35 people, Radenbaugh added.

“The core strategy is to continue to develop new vehicle categories,” Radenbaugh  said. “So while we’ll still be an  ebike company — and we’re always going to have pedals and it’s always going to have that type of experience — we will continue to create stuff that really blurs the lines between ebikes and scooters and mopeds and even the automotive industry.”

Electric bike sales boomed in 2020, a phenomenon driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the disruption it delivered consumers’ daily lives.

Now, Rad Power Bikes is reaping those rewards and using them to double its workforce and scale globally.

The Seattle-based startup said Thursday it has raised $150 million from institutional investors including Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global Fund, Fidelity Management & Research Company, TPG’s global impact investing platform The Rise Fund and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates. Existing investors Durable Capital Partners LP and Vulcan Capital also participated in the round.

The funding round — the largest of a U.S. electric bike startup — is a validation of Rad Power’s business model and its ability to expand beyond the $100 million in sales it generated in 2019. Rad Power Bikes declined to disclose its 2020 sales numbers.

Rad Power is a direct-to-consumer electric bike seller known for creating robust products that combine features like fat tires, big batteries and motors with touchscreens and even cargo carrying capacity — all at prices hundreds of dollars below its competitors.

The company, which was founded in 2007, initially was a low-volume custom bike builder. That changed in 2015, after Rad Power founder and CEO Mike Radenbaugh teamed up with friend Ty Collins and relaunched as a direct-to-consumer business. That year, they funded the RadRover Electric Fat Tire bike through an Indigogo campaign. The company has evolved into a large-volume seller and today has 11 different bikes in its portfolio, which are sold in 30 countries.

Rad Power has added more than just bikes. The company has built out its online sales platform, pre- and post-purchase customer support teams, retail showrooms, service van and a local service partner network. The company has always been profitable even as it has expanded, Radenbaugh said.

The company has largely been bootstrapped, although it did raise a private round of a few million dollars in 2009 and a $20 million injection of capital in 2020. To date, Rad Power has raised $175 million — the vast majority of which came in this new round.

“I felt this was a special opportunity because we’re able to accelerate investments into a bunch of areas of the business where we’ve already been experimenting for years and that we found work,” Radenbaugh said.

The funds will be used to scale in just about every sector of its business, Radenbaugh said. Rad Power employs 325 people today and Radenbaugh said they plan to double the team by the end of 2021. The company also plans to add more retail showrooms and service locations, continue to add more contract manufacturers in an aim to diversify its supply chain, and add more accessories so consumers and customize their bikes.

The team that will grow the fastest is Rad Power’s research and development department, which is currently at about 35 people, Radenbaugh added.

“The core strategy is to continue to develop new vehicle categories,” Radenbaugh  said. “So while we’ll still be an  ebike company — and we’re always going to have pedals and it’s always going to have that type of experience — we will continue to create stuff that really blurs the lines between ebikes and scooters and mopeds and even the automotive industry.”

Mountaintop, a sort of supergroup game development studio founded by veterans from a multitude of other major companies in the industry, has collected a $5.5 seed round from friends and family, and announced that their first title will be a PvP shooter.

The company emerged last summer, headed by Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell and several others from larger gaming concerns that decided to strike off on their own. The idea would be to create an independent studio free from the pervasive culture of crunch and toxicity frequently found (or reported) at bigger publishers and developers.

Being independent also means no allowance from a big publisher, so they needed to get some capital to work with. That manifested from the enviably deep pockets of their families and friends, who I suppose felt more than justified in funding the activities of people whom they know to be successful entrepreneurs and industry movers and shakers.

The $5.5 million seed will go towards their first title, which will be a PvP shooter. Now, this may give some pause, as PvP shooters number among the last five years’ biggest successes (Overwatch, PUBG, Fortnite, Apex) and most notable failures (Crucible, Battleborn, Paragon, Gigantic) — the latter seemingly in fruitless attempts to emulate the former.

But the opportunistic corporate me-too attitude that sunk many a game is unlikely to exist at Mountaintop, a small team with no shareholders breathing down their neck — except their friends and family, who will be too polite to do so. If they think they can make an interesting and commercially viable PvP shooter, I say have at it, I’m tired of the other ones.

It’ll be nice to know that the product came from a crunch-free environment as well — as we’ve seen with Supergiant’s “Hades,” people working on their own schedules to make something they care about can have remarkable results.

As Mitchell put it:

We all know great games and products can be built without crunch. It’s about thoughtful scoping, planning, execution every step of the way. That’s not to say that avoiding crunch is easy — it’s incredibly challenging, especially with unexpected curve balls along the way.

In the end though, it always comes down to leadership and the decisions they make. At Mountaintop, we’re committed to doing right by the team, always.

The company has grown from the founding team of five now to 20. Although Mountaintop wasn’t intended from the start to be a pandemic-proof setup, its remote-first approach did mean that hiring during COVID didn’t mean changing how they planned for the company to work. Currently they have people from Epic, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, Respawn, Infinity Ward, Ubisoft, Raven, Turtle Rock, Double Fine, PopCap, and (obviously) Oculus.

But among the team’s other priorities were diversity and inclusion. With 19 of the 20 people on staff men, and 18 of the 20 white, that seems to be presenting more of a challenge to them.

“We’re just getting started, but we’re building a studio with diversity and inclusion at the core, where everyone feels like they belong. We have a long way to go, but we’re committed to seeing it through,” said Mitchell. With a target headcount of about 50, there’s a still a lot of room to grow into that promise.

No indication when we’ll learn more about the game, but at the current cadence we can probably expect another tidbit of info this summer.

The cloud infrastructure market in 2020 reflected society itself, with the richest companies getting richer and the ones at the bottom of the market getting poorer. It grew to $129 billion for the year, according to data from Synergy Research Group. That’s up from around $97 billion in 2019.

Synergy also reported that the cloud infra market reached $37 billion in the fourth quarter, up from $33 billion in the third quarter, and 35% from a year ago.

I’ve heard from every founder under the sun for the last 9 months that the pandemic was accelerating digital transformation, and that a big part of that was an expedited shift to the cloud. These numbers would seem to bear that out.

As usual the big three were Amazon, Microsoft and Google, with Alibaba now firmly entrenched in fourth place and IBM falling back to fifth. But Microsoft grew more quickly than rival Amazon, reaching 20% market share at the end of 2020 for the first time. Keep in mind that the Redmond-based software giant has now doubled its share since 2017. That’s remarkably rapid rapid growth. Meanwhile Google and Alibaba took home 9% and 6% respectively.

Here’s what that all looks like in chart form:

Amazon is an interesting case in that it has plateaued at around 33% for four straight years of Synergy data, but because it’s one-third share of an increasingly growing market, that means that it has kept growing its public cloud revenues as the category itself has expanded.

Amazon closed out the year with $12.74 billion in Q4 AWS revenue, putting it on a run rate of over just over $50 billion for the first time. That was up from $11.6 billion the prior quarter. While Microsoft’s numbers are always difficult to parse from its earning’s reports, doing the math of 20% of $37 billion, it came in with $7.4 billion up from $5.9 billion last quarter.

Google brought in $3.3 billion, up from $2.98 billion in Q3 2020, and Alibaba pulled in $2.22 billion, up from $1.65 billion over the same timeframe.

John Dinsdale, principal analyst at Synergy says the leaders are pretty firmly entrenched at this point with huge absolute market numbers and also huge gaps between the cloud providers. “AWS has been a great success story for over ten years now and it remains in an extremely strong market position despite increasing competition from a broad swathe of strong IT industry companies. That is a great testament both to Amazon and to the AWS leadership team and you’d have to suspect that will not change with the new regime,’ he told me.

He sees Microsoft as a worthy rival, but one that is bound to hit a growth wall at some point. “It is certainly feasible that Microsoft will continue to narrow the gap between itself and Amazon, but the bigger Microsoft Azure becomes the tougher it is to maintain really high growth rates. That is just the law of large numbers.”

Meanwhile, market share at the bottom of the cloud infrastructure space continued to decline even while the number of dollars at stake have continued to expand dramatically. “The market share losers have been the large group of smaller cloud providers, who collectively have lost 13 percentage points of market share over the last 16 quarters,” Synergy wrote in a statement.

Dinsdale says all is not lost for these players, however. “Regarding the smaller players (or the big companies that have only a small market share), they can either focus on specific market niches (can be based around geography, service type or customer vertical) or they can try to offer a broad range of cloud services to a broad range of customers. Companies doing the former can do quite well, while companies doing the latter will find it extremely tough,” Dinsdale told me.

It’s worth noting that Canalys has slightly different numbers with a total market of around $142 billion and almost $40 billion for the quarter, but the percentages are in line with Synergy’s:

At some point the numbers get so big they almost cease to have meaning, but as large as the public cloud revenue numbers become, they remain a relatively small percentage of overall worldwide IT spend. According to Gartner estimates, worldwide IT spend in 2020 was $3.6 trillion (with a T). That means that the cloud infrastructure market accounted for just 3.85% of total spend in 2020.

Think about that for a moment: less than 4% of IT spend currently is on cloud infrastructure, leaving so much room for growth and for those billions to grow ever bigger in the coming years.

It would certainly make it more interesting if someone could come in and disrupt the leaders, but for now at least they are going to be hard to push out of the way unless something unforeseen and dramatic happens to the way we think about computing.

As companies gather more data, ensuring that they can trust the quality of that data is becoming increasingly important. An analytics pipeline is only as good as the data it collects, after all, and messy data — or outright bugs — can easily lead to issues further down the line.

Seattle-based Iteratively wants to help businesses build data pipelines they can trust. The company today announced a $5.4 million seed funding round led by Google’s AI-centric Gradient Ventures fund. Fika Ventures and early Iteratively investor PSL Ventures also participated, with Gradient Ventures partner Zach Bratun-Glennon joining the company’s board.

Patrick Thompson, Iteratively’s Co-founder and CEO, started working on Iteratively about two years ago. Before that, he worked at Atlassian and at Syncplicity, where he met his co-founder Ondrej Hrebicek. After getting started, the team spent six months doing customer discovery and the theme they picked up on was that companies weren’t trusting the data they captured.

“We interviewed a ton of companies who built internal solutions, trying to solve this particular problem. We actually built one at Atlassian, as well, so I was very much intimately familiar with this pain. And so we decided to bring a product to market that really helps alleviate the pain,” he told me.

In a lot of companies, the data producers and data consumers don’t really talk to each other — and if they do, it’s often only through a spreadsheet or wiki. Iteratively aims to provide a collaborative environment to bring these different groups together and create a single source of truth for all stakeholders. “Typically, there’s a handoff process, either on a JIRA ticket or a Confluence page or spreadsheet, where they try to hand over these requirements — and generally, it’s never really implemented correctly, which then causes a lot of pain points down down the line,” Thompson explained.

Currently, Iteratively focuses on event streaming data for product and marketing analytics — the kind of data that typically flows into a Mixpanel, Amplitude or Segment. Iteratively itself sits at the origin of the data, say an app, and then validates the data and routes it to whatever third-party solution a company may use. That means the tool sits right where the data is generated, but this setup also means that none of the data ever flows through Iteratively’s own servers.

“We don’t actually see the data,” Thompson stressed. “We’re not a data set processor. We’re a wrapper over the top of your own analytics pipeline or your own third party SaaS tools, but we verify the payloads as they flow through our SDK on the client.”

Over time, though, that may change, he acknowledged and Iteratively may do some data processing as well, but likely with a focus on metadata and observability.

Since the company doesn’t actually process any of the data itself, it’s charging customers by seat and not based on how many events move through their pipelines, for example. That may obviously change over time as the company looks into doing some data processing on its side as well.

Currently, Iteratively has about 10 employees and plans to grow that to 20 by the end of the year. The company plans to hire across R&D, sales and marketing.

“Iteratively‘s software has a unique approach to enabling company-wide collaboration and enforcing data quality,” said Gradient’s Bratun-Glennon. “Going forward, we believe that intelligent analytics and data-driven business decision making will differentiate successful companies and best-in-class products. Iteratively‘s mission, product and team are poised to give each of their customers these capabilities.”

As companies gather more data, ensuring that they can trust the quality of that data is becoming increasingly important. An analytics pipeline is only as good as the data it collects, after all, and messy data — or outright bugs — can easily lead to issues further down the line.

Seattle-based Iteratively wants to help businesses build data pipelines they can trust. The company today announced a $5.4 million seed funding round led by Google’s AI-centric Gradient Ventures fund. Fika Ventures and early Iteratively investor PSL Ventures also participated, with Gradient Ventures partner Zach Bratun-Glennon joining the company’s board.

Patrick Thompson, Iteratively’s Co-founder and CEO, started working on Iteratively about two years ago. Before that, he worked at Atlassian and at Syncplicity, where he met his co-founder Ondrej Hrebicek. After getting started, the team spent six months doing customer discovery and the theme they picked up on was that companies weren’t trusting the data they captured.

“We interviewed a ton of companies who built internal solutions, trying to solve this particular problem. We actually built one at Atlassian, as well, so I was very much intimately familiar with this pain. And so we decided to bring a product to market that really helps alleviate the pain,” he told me.

In a lot of companies, the data producers and data consumers don’t really talk to each other — and if they do, it’s often only through a spreadsheet or wiki. Iteratively aims to provide a collaborative environment to bring these different groups together and create a single source of truth for all stakeholders. “Typically, there’s a handoff process, either on a JIRA ticket or a Confluence page or spreadsheet, where they try to hand over these requirements — and generally, it’s never really implemented correctly, which then causes a lot of pain points down down the line,” Thompson explained.

Currently, Iteratively focuses on event streaming data for product and marketing analytics — the kind of data that typically flows into a Mixpanel, Amplitude or Segment. Iteratively itself sits at the origin of the data, say an app, and then validates the data and routes it to whatever third-party solution a company may use. That means the tool sits right where the data is generated, but this setup also means that none of the data ever flows through Iteratively’s own servers.

“We don’t actually see the data,” Thompson stressed. “We’re not a data set processor. We’re a wrapper over the top of your own analytics pipeline or your own third party SaaS tools, but we verify the payloads as they flow through our SDK on the client.”

Over time, though, that may change, he acknowledged and Iteratively may do some data processing as well, but likely with a focus on metadata and observability.

Since the company doesn’t actually process any of the data itself, it’s charging customers by seat and not based on how many events move through their pipelines, for example. That may obviously change over time as the company looks into doing some data processing on its side as well.

Currently, Iteratively has about 10 employees and plans to grow that to 20 by the end of the year. The company plans to hire across R&D, sales and marketing.

“Iteratively‘s software has a unique approach to enabling company-wide collaboration and enforcing data quality,” said Gradient’s Bratun-Glennon. “Going forward, we believe that intelligent analytics and data-driven business decision making will differentiate successful companies and best-in-class products. Iteratively‘s mission, product and team are poised to give each of their customers these capabilities.”

Extra Crunch is about to turn two years old and we now have a lot of demanding subscribers. Readers tell us that they want more articles — in even more depth — about the latest trends in early-stage startups and tech industries around the world.

We’re hiring for three key additional roles right now to help make this happen, including a project manager, a desk editor and a daily reporter.

If you think one of these positions is for you, please email a resume and a two-paragraph description of your interest and qualifications to ec_editors@techcrunch.com.

Daily reporter

We’re looking for someone who loves data-driven research and reporting to help us figure out what’s really going on across the world of new startups. You’ll work closely with the Extra Crunch core team to dig into emerging topics and ideas, chase down the right data and experts and put it all together in a multi-author newsletter with us.

Responsibilities:

• Data-driven researching and reporting as needed for daily newsletter
• Writing assignments for daily newsletter
• Writing other assigned Extra Crunch articles from time to time

Qualifications:

• Proven experience in tech and business reporting or in other fields that involve a lot of research related to startups
• Strong internal motivation to figure out how the world really works
• General interest in startups and technology
• Ability to work closely in a small team

Compensation:

• Freelance with flexible structures of 20+ hours of work per week
• Highly competitive pay rates based on your qualifications
• Remote-only

Desk editor

We’re looking for an editor who can bring clarity and nuance to any article they touch. The finer points of editing can make all the difference in how our readers understand the ideas we’re sharing. In this role, you’ll work closely with Extra Crunch editors to produce great articles from a wide range of writers.

Responsibilities:

• Editing article drafts line by line for clarity, relevance and accuracy
• Managing components of our product in WordPress, including some tagging and landing page content as directed
• Updating components of our overall editorial calendar system
• Communicating with Extra Crunch editors, TechCrunch staff and industry guest columnists as part of the production process

Qualifications:

• Comfort with AP style
• General awareness of the technology startup ecosystem as it exists in 2021
• General awareness of the U.S. and global business environment as it exists in 2021
• 5+ years editing in a journalistic environment preferred

Qualified applicants will be asked to complete an editing test as part of our hiring process.

Compensation:

• Freelance with flexible structures of 20+ hours of work per week
• Highly competitive pay rates based on your qualifications
• Remote-only

Project manager

Extra Crunch relies on a number of internal databases to help us produce insightful articles. A main one right now is The TechCrunch List, which features hundreds of investors across 22 technology industries across the world, based on thousands of founder recommendations we get about that key person who wrote the first check — but there are more active and in the works. We need someone who can manage this whole system in close collaboration with Extra Crunch editors as it expands.

Responsibilities:

• Producing internal data views for the TechCrunch editorial staff to produce articles with, using our databases and tools
• Updating and analyzing our startup-focused databases using information from the editorial staff, other parts of TechCrunch (events, newsletters, etc.), and other sources
• Communicating with founders, investors and others in the startup ecosystems that we cover
• Developing new ways to use our existing databases
• Developing and implementing new ideas together with the Extra Crunch team

Qualifications:

• Proven ability to work with data tools like Airtable, Google Sheets and Excel
• Passion for great data structure and process
• Experience managing data-driven projects from idea through to analysis of results
• General interest and familiarity with the startup world

Compensation:

• Freelance with flexible structures of 20+ hours of work per week
• Highly competitive pay rates based on your qualifications
• Remote-only

If you think one of these positions is for you, please email a resume and a two-paragraph description of your interest and qualifications to ec_editors@techcrunch.com.

The commercialization of space isn’t just about what new sensors we can put into orbit on cheaper and smaller satellites — it’s also about studying and leveraging the advantages of a microgravity environment on manufacturing and production. European startup Space Cargo Unlimited is focused on turning microgravity benefits into viable commercial ventures on Earth, and it just announced it will be working with global vine nursery company Mercier on applying the benefits of space to create more-hardy wine grape vines.

Space Cargo Unlimited has already done some work on how microgravity can impact wine — it shipped a crate of red wine to the International Space Station in 2019, and then returned it to Earth last year after a full 12 months aging aboard the station in near zero-G. Now, the startup has formed a subsidiary dedicated to in-space biotech specifically, Space Biology Unlimited, and it’s going to be the one working with Mercier on figuring out how to grow new grape vine varietals that are more resistant to changes in the climates in which they grown.

In addition to the case of Bordeaux that Space Cargo Unlimited sent up, the company also sent 320 vine canes (basically the core structure of a vine that results from the maturation of the juvenile shoot), and it just recently received those back on SpaceX’s cargo return trip from the ISS. Those canes, half from Cabernet grapes and half from Cabernet Sauvignon, have shown “unprecedented biological changes” according to Mercier CEO Guillaume Mercier in a statement. They’ll now be cloned and studied to see if they provide any advantages in terms of potential for growth on “our fast-warming planet,” he added.

Everything from battery production, to additive manufacturing, to basic chemical and medical manufacturing has been tested in a microgravity environment. Microgravity can reduce the physical strain of gravity, most obviously, to make production of complex structures possible where it wouldn’t be on Earth. The unique environment, which also includes a much different radiation profile, also leads to unexpected variances in the growth and development of organic structures that, while they don’t occur naturally on Earth, can sometimes be replicated to achieve useful outcomes.

The effects of microgravity have been studied using the ISS for years, but more affordable and frequent access to space has made it a much more promising commercial avenue for many companies and startups that previously wouldn’t have been able to justify the associated costs or time frames around the work. Space Cargo Unlimited is one of the companies that looks well-positioned to capitalize on this growing trend.

The commercialization of space isn’t just about what new sensors we can put into orbit on cheaper and smaller satellites — it’s also about studying and leveraging the advantages of a microgravity environment on manufacturing and production. European startup Space Cargo Unlimited is focused on turning microgravity benefits into viable commercial ventures on Earth, and it just announced it will be working with global vine nursery company Mercier on applying the benefits of space to create more-hardy wine grape vines.

Space Cargo Unlimited has already done some work on how microgravity can impact wine — it shipped a crate of red wine to the International Space Station in 2019, and then returned it to Earth last year after a full 12 months aging aboard the station in near zero-G. Now, the startup has formed a subsidiary dedicated to in-space biotech specifically, Space Biology Unlimited, and it’s going to be the one working with Mercier on figuring out how to grow new grape vine varietals that are more resistant to changes in the climates in which they grown.

In addition to the case of Bordeaux that Space Cargo Unlimited sent up, the company also sent 320 vine canes (basically the core structure of a vine that results from the maturation of the juvenile shoot), and it just recently received those back on SpaceX’s cargo return trip from the ISS. Those canes, half from Cabernet grapes and half from Cabernet Sauvignon, have shown “unprecedented biological changes” according to Mercier CEO Guillaume Mercier in a statement. They’ll now be cloned and studied to see if they provide any advantages in terms of potential for growth on “our fast-warming planet,” he added.

Everything from battery production, to additive manufacturing, to basic chemical and medical manufacturing has been tested in a microgravity environment. Microgravity can reduce the physical strain of gravity, most obviously, to make production of complex structures possible where it wouldn’t be on Earth. The unique environment, which also includes a much different radiation profile, also leads to unexpected variances in the growth and development of organic structures that, while they don’t occur naturally on Earth, can sometimes be replicated to achieve useful outcomes.

The effects of microgravity have been studied using the ISS for years, but more affordable and frequent access to space has made it a much more promising commercial avenue for many companies and startups that previously wouldn’t have been able to justify the associated costs or time frames around the work. Space Cargo Unlimited is one of the companies that looks well-positioned to capitalize on this growing trend.

Today, two giants of the cannabis industry are announcing a partnership to create an improved retail experience for consumers and dispensaries alike. Through this partnership, Leafly and Jane’s technology solutions will offer dispensaries powerful tools to sync online e-commerce with in-store inventory — something that is sorely lacking in the cannabis world.

Legal weed shoppers know the pain. A handful of different apps report to show the inventory of local dispensaries and often do not line up with the store’s real-time inventory. What’s more, sometimes other dispensaries have different ways of listing the same product. There’s a good reason for the dispensaries: there’s not an industry standard UPC barcode and the dispensaries often have hundreds of fast-moving SKUs from dozens of vendors.

Leafly and Jane’s partnership seeks to solve the pain on both sides of the counter. Jane’s technology enables dispensaries to build a modern e-commerce platform through automation and machine learning. Jane’s technology will soon be built into Leafly’s Menu Solutions that works with over 30 point-of-sale systems. This should result in less tedious work for the dispensaries and a much more consistent online experience for the shopper.

Jane and Leafly have deep inroads into the cannabis world. According to this announcement’s press release, over the past year, Jane’s solution powered over 17 million orders and $2 billion in cannabis sales. Over 1,800 dispensaries and brands use Jane. Likewise, in 2020, more than 4,500 cannabis retailers used Leafly’s platform, and the company saw 120 million visitors to its online marketplace.

Despite the successes, Leafly experienced a turbulent 2020 with layoffs and leadership changes. Yoko Miyashita took over as the company’s CEO in August 2020 and has been focused on Leafly leaning heavily into building a better online shopping experience.

Right now, in early 2021, there isn’t an Amazon of weed or even a Shopify of weed for several reasons, but primarily because the cannabis industry is still under a federal prohibition. This solution pushes the cannabis industry closer to a modern e-commerce business. With Jane’s ability to standardize and auto-populate product listings, and Leafly’s deep point of sale integrations, both the consumer and dispensary sees benefits.

TechCrunch spoke to Leafly and Jane’s CEOs on this partnership. It’s clear that the two are excited about this project and see this partnership as a watershed moment for retail cannabis.

“[Dispensaries] don’t have a solution that can be seamless like a Shopify or Amazon,” Jane’s CEO Socrates Rosenfeldsaid. “I think, together with Jane’s ability to cleanse information in real-time, and essentially automate e-commerce for large brick and mortar selling sellers, combining that with Leafly’s consumer marketplace, we are making shopping for cannabis as simple as shopping on Amazon.”

TK explained that he sees this partnership goes behind an Amazon-like shopping experience. He sees this as a way of returning value and protecting local dispensaries by empowering them with technology.

“The problems in cannabis are unique enough, and the plant has a complexity that we want to honor,” Leafly CEO Yoko Miyashita said. We don’t think we can get there with antiquated ways of doing things. It’s bringing the intentionality around shared values to innovate and ultimately empower the communities that we serve.”