Early-Stage Cannabis Fund Launches A $10M Fund To Invest In Cannabis Tech
Minority-owned early-stage cannabis fund, JourneyOne Ventures, has closed a $10 million fund to invest in businesses within the growing cannabis industry.
The fund includes a range of investors like Paul Bown, founder of Bowen; Elizabeth Yin, general partner at Hustle Fund; Eric Manlunas, general partner at Wavemaker Partners and Fred Kang, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
JourneyOne Ventures, founded in 2017 by Helene Servillon, is committed to building a community of genuinely talented entrepreneurs. The investment company, 100% women-led and minority-owned, invests in bold performers within the cannabis industry who have senior-level experience working within the tangential industry. The early-stage cannabis fund centers its work around supporting and developing businesses designed to make it big and have the capabilities to make it happen.
“I created JourneyOne Ventures because the firm I wanted to work at didn’t exist,” said CEO of JourneyOne Ventures, Helene Servillon, in an interview with TechCrunch.
“Before I became a VC, I was an early-stage operator in emerging industries and saw the need to bring an operator-experienced fund to market that had differentiated network in and out of the cannabis industry and focused solely on pre-seed to Series A startups,”
The investment firm has already started investing in startups using business-to-business software specifically designed for the cannabis industry; these include Komplyd, Nabis, Cellibre, Wundre, and Plant People.
“We’re starting to see the emergence of roll-ups in the tech ecosystem, but it is very early still. I would say a lot of roll-ups are focused on smaller features,” Servillon added. “As a startup company, you have a specific go-to-market and problem you’re looking to solve. Once you expand and scale, there are certain categories that were built for roll-ups. Point-of-sale systems are one example.”
Their goal is to increase limited partner representation in their fund across different ethnic backgrounds, geographies, communities, and professions. They are also keeping an eye on the evolution of the cannabis market, which is quickly maturing as new opportunities continue to rise.
