LeafLink raises $35M Series B led by Thrive Capital for its e-commerce marketplace that connects 1,200+ licensed cannabis brands to 3,500+ cannabis retailers
Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News :
Context & Ripple Effects
In mid-2019 LeafLink was building the B2B layer of legal cannabis commerce: an e-commerce marketplace where 1,200+ licensed brands sell into 3,500+ retailers, in an industry largely shut out of mainstream commerce platforms. Weeks earlier, Confident Cannabis had raised a $12M Series A for wholesale trading and lab testing — evidence that investors saw cannabis supply-chain software as its own fundable category rather than a niche.
Thrive Capital led the $35M Series B, notable because the firm had separately placed roughly $100M in Shopify as a bet on commerce software — the same underlying thesis applied to a market that mainstream platforms don't serve. The trajectory validated the early check: by early 2023 LeafLink had grown to connect 3,700+ brands with 8,400+ retailers and raised a $100M Series D.
First-order effects
- LeafLink gets the capital to scale its brand-to-retailer marketplace ahead of rivals like Leafly, whose own consumer-facing marketplace drew fresh funding in 2021, and Treez, which powers retail operations on the other side of the transaction.
Second-order effects
- A funded B2B marketplace raises the bar for adjacent cannabis retail-stack players — Greenbits' 2020 Series B and Treez's 2022 round at a $260M+ valuation show the category attracting successive waves of capital to keep pace.
Third-order effects
- If licensed cannabis remains locked out of general-purpose commerce rails, the industry keeps consolidating around purpose-built marketplaces and retail platforms, with multi-stage investors treating it as durable vertical SaaS infrastructure.
The trend: Cannabis commerce is maturing into dedicated B2B software infrastructure, with each funding round pushing marketplaces like LeafLink further up the stack from directory to operating system.