This is the Eaze pitch deck to raise a $35m series-d round in 2020.
About
Eaze is an online marketplace and technology platform that helps provide legal access to cannabis through safe and convenient delivery. In doing so, Eaze works with and assists local cannabis entrepreneurs in expanding their businesses sustainably and responsibly.
Eaze was once a darling of cannabis and cannabis-curious investors.
With the promise of the rapid spread of cannabis legalization in new markets, venture capital firms and high net worth investors were trying to figure out how to bet on the potentially millions of new consumers getting access to a product that had been classified as a Schedule I drug for half a century.
In 2017, companies like Eaze, ostensibly a delivery service, used the promise of a cannabis boom to woo investors and grow their businesses.
Because cannabis is federally illegal in the US, many investors are barred from betting on companies that handle the plant itself. To them, Eaze was an attractive investment because, as a middleman, it handled cannabis transactions but didn’t derive any revenue from selling marijuana.
Like many startups that sought to aggressively expand in emerging markets with lots of legal gray area, the initial story that the startup trotted out to investors in 2017 — of widespread legalization and hundreds of millions in revenue in a few short years — was more attractive than the reality that materialized.
Business Insider obtained internal documents from Eaze, including its 2020 pitch deck published in full below, that reveal the startup’s pivot and scaled-back ambitions after a series of setbacks including layoffs, a lawsuit, and executive churn.
By January of this year, the company had pared back its sales projections and announced that it was shifting to running its own dispensaries and selling its own branded cannabis products on its platform.
Comparing Eaze in its early days to Eaze now “is a bit like apples to oranges,” an Eaze spokesperson told Business Insider.
“I think since the early exuberant days of 2015, 16, and 17, people have had to do a lot of reconciling between what they thought the market would look like and what the market actually supports,” the spokesperson said.
Once billed as the ‘Uber of weed,’ Eaze has scaled back its ambitions
Once billed as the “Uber of weed,” the startup promised an easy way to connect dispensaries and brands to consumers. Using Eaze’s app, consumers could easily order cannabis from a variety of dispensaries and have it delivered to their doorsteps.
In 2018, as California opened up its adult-use cannabis market, Eaze transitioned from delivering medical cannabis to recreational, which would reach a much larger customer base.
Eaze’s initial business made money by charging dispensaries a technology fee and providing advertising space, data, and menu placement to brands, per a 2017 pitch deck reviewed by Business Insider. The drivers that delivered orders through the Eaze app were paid by the dispensaries or brands that partner with Eaze, rather than by Eaze itself.
In the 2017 pitch deck, produced before adult-use legalization went into effect in California, the company predicted massive scale, touted expansion plans into eight new states by the first half of 2019, and said it would handle $1 billion worth of cannabis transactions across multiple states by the end of 2020 with what the company expected to be thriving commercial cannabis markets. In 2016, the company handled just $24 million in cannabis sales.
Eaze’s 2020 pitch deck reveals a very different company than what it predicted it would be in its earlier years.
In the 2020 deck, Eaze says it hopes to sell $190 million worth of cannabis by the end of this year, generating $125 million in revenue — a far cry from the $1 billion projection three years earlier.
Eaze has raised $201 million from investors
In the 2017 deck, Eaze claimed to be the “only service that supports credit card payments,” a claim formed the basis of a lawsuit filed in June 2019 on behalf of the Toronto-based Dionymed, a former partner and competitor of Eaze. Most cannabis companies, at the time, couldn’t take credit cards, since the substance is federally illegal. The lawsuit is complex, but at the heart of it, Dionymed claimed that Eaze was committing fraud by accepting credit and debit card payments.
Funding rounds
| Announced Date | Transaction Name | Number of Investors | Money Raised | Lead Investors |
| Feb 25, 2020 | Series D – Eaze | 2 | $35M | — |
| Dec 13, 2018 | Series C – Eaze | — | $84M | — |
| Mar 8, 2018 | Series B – Eaze | — | $32M | — |
| Sep 14, 2017 | Series B – Eaze | 6 | $27M | Bailey Venture Partners |
| Aug 1, 2017 | Series B – Eaze | 1 | — | — |
| Aug 1, 2017 | Series B – Eaze | — | — | — |
| Oct 24, 2016 | Series B – Eaze | 5 | $13M | Fresh VC |
| May 1, 2015 | Non Equity Assistance – Eaze | — | — | — |
| Apr 14, 2015 | Series A – Eaze | 10 | $10M | DCM Ventures |
| Nov 5, 2014 | Seed Round – Eaze | 5 | $1.5M | DCM Ventures, Fresh VC |
Pitch deck review summary
Slide by slide review
Deck Collection
See the rest of the collection here:
Comments (0)
There are no comments yet :(