Passing The Joint (Venture): General Cannabis Inhales Weedmaps

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

General Cannabis, whose admirable mission is to “improve your quality of life”, has acquired a dime bag of Weedmaps, as first pre-announced back in September. General Cannabis, formerly known as LC Luxuries Limited, is buying the “Yelp for pot” for a mix of cash and stock with additional earn-out potential for the company’s duo of founders, although the exact terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Stoner jokes aside, General Cannabis, a publicly traded company on the Pink Sheets, says it had been planning the acquisition of Weedmaps for a long time.

As part of the deal, Weedmaps co-founders Justin Hartfield and Keith Hoerling have entered into long-term employment contracts with General Cannabis and will assume the roles of Chief Web Officer and Chief Technology Officer, respectively.

The combination of both companies make sense, particularly considering General Cannabis actively manages medical marijuana dispensaries under the name US Cannabis.

Weedmaps.com is essentially an online community where medical marijuana patients connect with other patients in their geographic region to discuss and review local cannabis co-operatives, dispensaries, medical doctors and delivery services.

Weedmaps is also quite a solid business. As our own Sarah Lacy reported last month, Weedmaps brings in roughly $400,000 in monthly revenues, of just 50,000 registered users.

Hartfield told Lacy that the newly formed combined entity intends to acquire and “roll up” (ok, so one more stoner joke doesn’t hurt, right) several smaller companies in the future, likely also around the cannabis issue.

We’ll be watching this joint closely (ok, I’ll quit now – oops!).

As a reminder: Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson fame was allegedly too chicken to make an investment in WeedMaps in recent times. Will he regret this at some point?

Company: WeedMaps Media
Launch Date: August 1, 2008

Weedmaps offers a directory of legal marijuana dispensaries, most of which are located in California. WeedMaps.com is a community where medical marijuana patients connect with other patients in their geographic region to freely discuss and review local cannabis co-operatives, dispensaries, medical doctors and delivery services! Dispensaries and Doctors can list their services for FREE. Patients can register for FREE. Customer Service: 949-870-1472

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