CannaTech Denver focuses on compliance

The CannaTech Denver events have been hit and miss, but last night’s event featured speakers from Complia and Flowhub. Dave and I attended and thought we’d share the highlights:

Complia

• The first presenter was Hari Gopalakrishna, CTO of Complia. His content was interesting for us as competitors. His delivery was weak, bordering on terrible (I personally could not get past his thick accent). On a humorous note, Hari pronounced compliance as “COM-plee-unce” with the emphasis on the first syllable. Which we suppose is why Complia is pronounced “COM-plee-uh.”
• Interestingly, he describes Complia as a document management system rather than a compliance system. I think it’s because the document management technology is his baby. He built and sold a document management system to the Department of Veterans Affairs, then used the proceeds to start Complia. He didn’t actually demo the system, but it sounds pretty slick. Hari said there are 13,000 documents in their system.
• Complia claims to have 10% of the licenses in CO and the state of Maryland. The 10% seems like a stretch given what we know of them.

Flowhub

• The second presenter was BriAnne Ramsay, Head of Compliance and Business Solutions at Flowhub. Better speaker and thankfully, she pronounced compliance correctly! Flowhub is in seven states and has several products that are tailored for cultivations and dispensaries.
• She describes Flowhub as the only networked POS and compliance system. She uses “networked” to help differentiate Flowhub from other inventory and POS systems, none of which have the technology to let multiple stores share inventory and sales data in real time.
• And she means it when she says it is a compliance system. She talked at length about how Metrc is merely a recording system and will let you do many inventory tasks in non-compliant ways. As a compliance system, Flowhub helps you do those tasks in compliant ways – she specifically mentioned variance reporting and some sort of automated report that goes directly to the regulatory agencies.
• BriAnne also talked about FlowHub as more than just a software. Similar to what MJ Freeway told us on a call recently, they’re growing their consulting services. Probably partly because there’s such a market, but also because much of the reporting and data above can be very dense.

We came away thinking Complia is less of a competitor than we’d thought, and Flowhub is more of a competitor than we thought. Of note, Flowhub touts Native Roots as one of its best clients.

And one last interesting point from BriAnne: some interesting data about Los Angeles dispensaries and the city’s propensity for shutting them down.