At the Green Market Report Finance Summit, hosted at the New England Cannabis Convention in Boston on March 22, Viridian Capital Advisors nabbed the award for Best Financing Provider.
The marijuana-focused investment firm will celebrate its 10-year anniversary this coming June, said CEO and founder Scott Greiper, but he still remembers getting into the cannabis trade “like it was yesterday.”
At that time, Greiper was in the cybersecurity business, until he got a call from a company that was investing in security – armored cars, video surveillance, vaults – for marijuana shops in Colorado, which had just launched the first-ever recreational cannabis market in January 2014.
“That was my first inkling of what was happening,” Greiper said. “I did some homework … this was back in late 2013, that the annual value of the amount of cannabis consumed in the U.S. every year was about $45 billion. … It’s like the proverbial lightbulb on top of your head. I was like, this is unique. We’ve got a monster consumer industry.”
As soon as he launched Viridian Capital Advisors, Greiper said he began getting calls from those in the state-legal trade, asking for help figuring out valuations for cannabis companies.
“I got off the phone, and I started looking for anybody, any firm, that had put together a comparable company deal list,” Greiper recalled. “It was zero. It didn’t exist.”
So he started the Viridian Deal Tracker in 2015, just months after launching the firm itself, to keep tabs on financial deals of all stripes in the U.S. marijuana trade.
“I say that as a source of pride, because without data, and without understanding how deals are structured … how does anyone really understand how to price, how to structure, what are the terms? They don’t. I think we filled a massive information gap,” Greiper said.
These days, Greiper said, investors and executives in cannabis are getting more savvy and much pickier about what they want to buy, which he said is a reflection of the industry’s maturation. He said he’s looking forward to the globalization of the cannabis trade, as more of Europe and Latin America reform their marijuana laws and begin joining the industry.
And Greiper sees an opening there for Viridian.
“There is over the next couple of years going to be the emergence of more cross-border transactions between,” Greiper said. “With Germany going legal on the rec side, Switzerland on the rec side, I’ve done this before in my homeland security business: I became a bridge between Germany, Japan, U.K., Mexico, France, working through me to invest in security technologies… We’re positioning ourselves to be a player, an intermediary, between the European cannabis market and the U.S.”
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