NEW YORK – Dispense, a leading digital dispensary management platform, today announced the completion of its $2M seed funding. The round of investment is led by NextView Ventures with NextView co-founder, Lee Hower, joining the Dispense board. Leading cannabis VC’s Poseidon Asset Management and Achari Ventures participated, along with Arrive, a Roc Nation company, and Wayne Chang.
Dispense is one of the fastest growing software companies in the cannabis space. The platform is currently used by dispensaries in five states, including Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Since its beta launch in August 2020, Dispense has processed over 1.5 million orders, with an order value of over $200 million with only two employees. Co-founders Kyla Moore and Tim Officer plan to use the funding to hire top talent, continue developing and enhancing their product, and scale their sales and marketing efforts.
Prior to launching Dispense, Kyla and Tim founded Tablelist and TablelistPro, an online ticketing, reservations and venue management software for nightlife and events. When nightlife and in-person events stopped due to the pandemic, the team pivoted and repurposed the software to help cannabis dispensaries manage their customer purchases and pick-ups.
“What makes Dispense unique is that our software is built to empower our dispensary partners, giving them simple-to-use tools to not only take online orders but to build and maintain direct customer relationships, optimize their sales, and streamline their operations,” said CEO and Co-Founder Kyla Moore. “This new funding will allow us to grow our team, expand into more states and continue to build features that align with the needs of the dispensaries and their customers.”
Dispense differentiates itself from other online dispensary management platforms by giving retailers 100% ownership of their customer data, online orders, and order details. Dispense gives business owners the tools to connect, build, and nurture relationships to create loyal and lasting customers. The platform is used by some of the country’s top dispensaries, including Ascend Wellness, a leading retailer in the Midwest and East Coast.
“Our experience using Dispense so far has been great,” said Abner Kurtin, CEO and Founder of Ascend Wellness. “Their hospitality and customer-centric approach to building the software has made it both intuitive and easy to use. Dispense e-commerce and order management software is an important part of our customer service experience at Ascend.”
“We are very pleased to have the opportunity to work with Kyla Moore and Tim Officer at Dispense,” commented Lee Hower, Co-Founder and Partner at NextView Ventures. “The growth they’ve achieved in the last year is astounding. I’ve worked with many early-stage software startups in my career, and Dispense’s software really is top-notch. We see tremendous opportunity to work with Dispense to help drive the expansion of their unique, customer-centric platform that is already making waves at some of the biggest dispensaries in the industry.”
“We are excited to be both an investor in Dispense and a strategic partner,” said Emily Paxhia, Co-Founder and Management Partner at Poseidon. “Their platform provides much-needed solutions to the growing cannabis retail sector, and their focus on the customer experience along with their refined software will help them scale across the cannabis industry while making retailers’ lives easier and the customers’ experiences more enjoyable.”
About Dispense
Dispense is B2B e-commerce software focused on providing cannabis dispensaries with the technology and tools they need to sell product online, manage operations, build direct customer relationships, and scale their businesses. Dispense was founded in 2020 by Kyla Moore and her Co-Founder & CTO Tim Officer who saw an opportunity to use their existing Tablelist ticketing and reservations technology to help cannabis dispensaries safely schedule and manage customer order pickups. The initial proof of concept succeeded, and now Dispense is being used by some of the largest and busiest dispensaries in the country.
