Seattle-based digital cannabis marketplace Leafly Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: LFLY) is kicking off April 20 on Wall Street.
Leafly CEO Yoko Miyashita will ring the opening bell on the Nasdaq on Wednesday, April 20, which is an unofficial holiday for marijuana. The bell-ringing ceremony takes place two months after the company's initial public offering on the Nasdaq through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
"What’s happened over the course of the last three to five years is that any plant-touching company that wanted to access the public markets has had to go via Canadian exchanges," Miyashita previously told the Business Journal. "What that leaves are the non-plant-touching, ancillary businesses that are of a size and scale that can actually list on the U.S. exchange. There’s very few, and we’re very proud of the fact that we’re one of them."
April 20 — or 4/20 in the cannabis cultural parlance — has long been a day of celebration for pot smokers, but its counter-culture roots have given way to mainstream festivities as more and more states legalize marijuana. In Seattle, for example, there is a cooking class, laser show and vendor event celebrating the day.
Miyashita will ring the bell in person in New York City on Wednesday morning along with Leafly's board, executive leadership, employees and friends. Miyashita has led the company as CEO since August of 2020, before which she was Leafly's general counsel.
Leafly, founded in 2010, allows consumers to shop and research cannabis products online. In its fourth-quarter 2021 financial results, the company said it generated $43 million in revenue last year, up 18% year over year. Leafly also noted it had 5,265 retail accounts as of the end of 2021, a 44% year-over-year increase.
The company had 10 million average monthly active users last year compared to 11.5 million in 2020, a decline Leafly attributed to the surge of consumers shopping online at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
