Bend software cannabis firm gets venture capital infusion

“These are all tier 1 investors,” said Ross Lipson, co-founder of Dutchie. “These are world-renowned investors that have continually invested in disruptive tech leaders.”

This recent round of funding brings the total investment to $253 million over the past four years, Lipson said. Investors for previous rounds were Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde Capital, Thrive Capital, Gron Ventures, former Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz, the Brooklyn Nets basketball star Kevin Durant and tech companies like Shutterstock and DoorDash.

Securing this kind of venture capital is big news for Central Oregon, said Roger Lee, Economic Development for Central Oregon CEO. As the region’s business development nonprofit, it signifies to others that Central Oregon can support a growing firm with this kind of market valuation and investor capital, Lee said.

“This is the largest, by far, for a software company in Bend,” said Brian Vierra, EDCO venture catalyst. “It firmly plants the city on the global start-up map. The talent and other resources that will be attracted, as a result of this deal, will accelerate the development of our ecosystem and cast aside forever the notion that you can’t build a scalable, venture-backed company here.”

The investments come despite federal Drug Enforcement Administration classifying cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug. The five-tiered classification ranks drugs depending on acceptable medical use and the drug’s abuse or dependency potential.

The newest funding will allow Dutchie to focus on expansion, market share and the platform, said Lipson, whose co-founder is his brother Zach Lipson.

The company recently acquired two competitors, LeafLogix and Greenbits, two cannabis point of sale companies.

Dutchie has about 100 employees working out of the NorthWest Crossing District 2 headquarters and about 200 employees scattered across 27 states, Lipson said.

“We have a distributed team with a focus on Bend,” Lipson said. “Post pandemic, we’ll continue the remote locations. We’re a people first company here. We want to move into new markets as they come online” (legalize recreational marijuana).

Dutchie, which started in 2017, is one of several companies that specialize in online commerce for cannabis. For a flat fee, Dutchie — named after a 1981 song called “Pass the Dutchie” — provides an online platform for cannabis retailers to sell products linked to their point of sale systems and at the same time keep track of inventory in real time. Customers can either pick up their items or have them delivered through another company.

Lipson has experience with taking companies public. Before moving to Bend, he started an online food-ordering program in Canada that he sold in 2012 called GrubCanada. It was acquired by Just-Eat, a publicly traded online food ordering company based in Europe.