Debra Borchardt
Altitude Investment Management is closing its Fund I on November 30, 2018, with $30 million raised. Altitude is led by John Brecker, Jon Trauben, Michael Goldberg, and Roderick Stephan. Fund I opened on March 1, 2018, and the company said that it has invested in 16 companies from early-stage to growth companies. The company plans to launch Fund II at the beginning of 2019 and hopes to raise $100 million.
Partner Jon Trauben sums up Altitude’s Fund I strategy by saying: “We sought reasonable valuation entry points taking advantage of early illiquidity and inefficiency due to the existing federal prohibition.”
Fund I’s portfolio consists of some of the leading firms spanning the North American cannabis industry with concentrations in plant-touching operators/brands/distribution and non-plant-touching companies providing compliance, advertising/marketing, ag-tech and data solutions including:
- BDS Analytics, the leader in cannabis business intelligence.
- Canndescent, a leading California ultra-premium brand with world-class management and best practices from consumer-packaged goods, advanced agriculture, and luxury lifestyle marketing.
- C4 Distro, a leader in the California cannabis distribution market that provides quality distribution services to California’s extremely fragmented market of suppliers and retailers.
- Enlighten, the leading in-dispensary digital marketing platform.
- Flowhub, a leading seed-to-sale compliance and robust point-of-sale SaaS platform in partnership with Hewlett Packard.
- Front Range Bio, an agricultural biotech company that specializes in tissue culture propagation of high-value crops at industrial scale to improve reliability, efficiency, and safety.
- GrassRoots, a fully-licensed, vertically-integrated multi-state cannabis company active in cultivation, extraction, manufacturing, branding, and retailing.
- Loud Pack Farms, a leading California vertically-integrated cannabis consumer products company with a family of brands including Loudpack, Kingpen, Double Barrel, and Honey Pot.
- PathogenDX, a provider of a patented DNA-based disruptive testing technology for state-mandated microbial testing and environmental screening.
- Segra, a Canadian plant biotechnology company that specializes in industrial-scale plant micropropagation and plant genotyping services.
- Würk, which helps cannabis companies provide the necessary human resources and payroll infrastructure to manage their employee’s needs and to stay compliant with government regulations.
Partner Michael Goldberg added, “As the cannabis industry matures, more companies will require significant growth capital to fund product, service and geographic expansion. In addition, increasing competition will create the need for consolidation, merger, and acquisition and distressed investment opportunities. A larger capital base in Fund II will ideally position Altitude to take advantage of these opportunities.”
