MassRoots Inc., a Boulder, Colo.-based private social networking website and app for the medicinal cannabis community, closed $475,000 in funding last week led by Boston-based hedge fund manger Doug Leighton of Duchess Opportunity Fund II.
"When we started raising our Series A round this spring, the demand was overwhelming -- in a little over 2 weeks of pitching, we received over $650,000 in commitments for a $475,000 round, an issue we never envisioned happening," Hyler Fortier, co-founder of MassRoots, told BostInno.
The semi-anonymous private networking site was built to connect medicinal users around the country outside the mainstream social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter. MassRoots makes it easier for dispensaries and their consumers to interact and allows cannabis users to seek other enthusiasts for romantic dates or social gatherings.
The funding will allow MassRoots to scale to hundreds of users, while implementing several features and creating user engagement, such as a "Tinder for Cannabis" tool that will make it easier to find smoking buddies and user generated videos on marijuana.
The app launched in April 2013, and came online in July 2013. Within the first eight weeks 5,000 users became active, mostly between the 18 to 24 age range. Now there are about 100,000 monthly users and the platform facilitates 15 million interactions according to BusinessInsider.
MassRoots was founded last April by the founders Isaac Dietrich and Fortier when they pooled together $17,000 from their personal savings. They staid committed to working without salaries as they were rejected by every venture capital firm they pitched to because they are based in the legal cannabis industry.
Last fall, they met with investor members from the ArcView Group who included Leighton and Keith Ubben who invested $150,000 in seed funding that allowed them to scale to 80,000 users with 15 million interactions by mid-March.
"The credit really does not belong to us: the source of MassRoots' success has been the amazing community of cannabis consumers that are constantly leaving positive feedback on posts, answering any marijuana-related question you could possibly imagine and are genuinely the most awesome people in the world," said Fortier.
This funding will likely help connect even more people with fabled stoner holiday 4/20 only 13 days away.
