Cannabis Startups Have Been Raking in Funding Long Before Privateer. Hits High in Q4 2014.

This week, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund announced that it was participating in a $75 million dollar investment round into cannabis venture Privateer Holdings reportedly at a $425M valuation. Given Thiel and Founders Fund’s prominence and the size of the round, there was a lot of hype around the deal, but the reality is that deal activity and funding have been steadily increasing to cannabis and marijuana related startups and ventures for the last two years.

Using CB Insights data, we aggregated all funding (both institutional and non-institutional) to companies in the cannabis industry, and it’s clear canna-business is booming. 2014 saw investors light up the space as marijuana related ventures raised a total of $104M across 59 deals.

The chart below highlights total funding to cannabis-related companies over the last five years.

While Privateer is by far the most well-funded of the bunch, we’ve highlighted 5 cannabis startups that have raised funding in the last year. These companies range from medical marijuana distributors to social networks for medicinal cannabis patients to care technologies for the industry.

Photo Credit: Martius

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