When Chris Violas, founder and CEO of cannabis seed-to-sale software company BLAZE, ran a cannabis delivery service under California’s Prop 215 system from 2011 to 2014, he saw firsthand the issues with which these businesses had to contend. Inventory management, driver dispatch, payments, ID checks… The logistics could be maddening.

With a background as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Start-up Business Development Manager, Violas felt something was off about the way delivery and retail operation owners were working, at the time. BLAZE “came from me looking at the problems and then saying, ‘There’s gotta be more technology here to help solve these problems,’” Violas tells Cannabis Business Executive.

In 2017, Violas shifted gears and launched BLAZE alongside Manh Do (co-founder and CTO) and his father Paul Violas, a cannabis attorney who contributed to the Long Beach, California cannabis regulation drafts and who also serves as the business’s General Counsel. As he builds out a company he hopes will be able to serve today’s market and the industry of tomorrow, the Younger Violas has continued to look for former operators turned techies as he builds out a company that he hopes will be able to serve both current operators and the future industry he envisions. 

Earlier this year, BLAZE acquired Greenline, a Canadian cannabis point-of-sale (POS) system.  “James, who runs our insights, was a business intelligence manager for a pretty large organization in Southern California,” Violas adds.

Now in 1,400 dispensaries across 16 U.S. states (AK, AZ, CA, CO, IL, NV, MA, MI, MO, NM, NJ, OK, OR, WA, VT, and soon: NY) and 8 Canadian provinces (AB, BC, SK, MB, ON, YU, NW, NT), Violas summarizes his company succinctly.

“We are cannabis operators that happen to be technologists solving a cannabis problem.”

Delivery + Retail First

As a former delivery retail operator, Violas is naturally excited about the delivery market, and has placed it at the forefront of BLAZE’s operations.“I’m really bullish on [delivery],” he says. “At the end of the day, all that’s leading to is more omnichannel participation. And for me, that is really important to see the industry continue to grow in. You can’t force customers to come [to your store], you gotta meet the customers where they’re at.”

In addition to allowing customers to browse nearby driver inventory from a delivery operator’s menu for rapid, on-demand service, BLAZE integrates with Onfleet and Tookan, two mainstream delivery service tools, to optimize high-volume routes for scheduled deliveries. BLAZE will also provide drivers (who operate using the Android or iOS app) with manifests and inventory ledgers in real-time, to help maintain compliance and smooth operations.

This efficiency can translate to increased economies for delivery services, Violas says, sharing an anecdote about helping a large Southern California delivery operator with 40 dispatchers managing up to 70 drivers, “down to 10” dispatchers.

The POS system, for its part, is an iOS-only app (requiring Apple devices at the front end) that only integrates with a specific selection of hardware. Violas admits the company likely won’t move away from having dedicated hardware, citing the importance of reliability in such mission-critical systems.

“We wanna make sure that if you’re in a high volume shop … that hardware’s working day in, day out,” Violas says. “To throw a random scanner in, to throw a random printer in, that can definitely cause some hiccups because we do integrate and code specific against specific hardware.”

Once the hardware and Apple devices are installed, users can quickly turn their website into an online store, create automated order-tracking text messages for customer deliveries, and set up multi-location management. 

While the software fits all business sizes, the latter feature, Violas says, makes BLAZE an especially powerful tool for single-state operators with multiple locations. 

These operations ”tend to know their community extremely well, and they happen to be very proficient in that market,” he says. Chains with procurement managers at each of their locations can streamline operations “with our master catalog product, which allows for centralized procurement,” the CEO adds, ”can take that down to one or two,  and still have the same experience” in-store.

Whether member management, loyalty, or communications, “that’s all at the company level,” Violas says. “We’re not limited to having individual databases per store because that can become extremely cumbersome and hard to maintain over time.”

Expanding Into the Vertical

Outside of its core offerings, BLAZE has expanded (through building or buying) into other segments of the cannabis supply chain. Branching out of delivery and retail is part of VIolas’s early vision that building a successful cannabis business would require vertical integration (where allowed). That’s what led to the acquisition of what would become BLAZE Grow in 2019 and was the impetus behind BLAZE Distro.

“We always had this vision that any successful cannabis operators should really be vertically integrated,” Violas says. “They can control the supply chain, they can control the quality of the product,” so being able to be a one-stop software shop made sense for who Violas sees as the long-term players in the cannabis market. “Our core competency, which I can tell you today, is absolutely retail. That’s our bread and butter day in, day out. … That being said, we also needed things like BLAZE Grow, BLAZE Distro to get into other markets where we wouldn’t be able to get in unless we had that vertical offering.”

BLAZEPay, the company’s payments platform, bolsters the retail experience, Violas says, “which is hardware, software, payments, everything coming together to be able to provide that seamless experience, both on the merchant side and the consumer side.”

BLAZE’s POS and retail management software can be further elevated by BLAZE Insights, the company’s retail analytics platform. Unlike market-level data and insights providers, BLAZE Insights “is there to uncover what’s going on at the operating level for these retailers, for these cultivators, whoever it may be,’ Violas explains. For example, a dispensary manager looking to understand their store’s inventory could identify expiring or aging products, informing them on what sales to prioritize, or illuminate a product with a sell rate that strays from the median.

On the delivery side, insights could touch on “What’s the transaction time look like on the delivery? What region are you delivering on?” Violas notes. “Does it make sense to cut that region down by 10% because you’re gonna, you’re gonna miss out on 3% of the orders, but. You’re gonna be able to service your core base better.”

The Build Continues

Part of the work of a software company is to continue identifying problems and developing new solutions. For example, Violas and his team launched BLAZE University earlier in 2022 to help address issues with budtender turnover. Noticing high budtender turnover rates and the potential pain point it is for retailers to have software company representatives train new staff every time someone leaves–a service BLAZE does provide–Violas saw an opportunity to automate.

“We wanted folks to make sure that they actually understood what they were doing, so BLAZE University is really built for budtenders, for inventory managers to go in and test their skills on the software,” the CEO explains. Budtenders and inventory managers will get acquainted with the software and hardware before entering live data or interacting with real customers. “Ultimately, as you get through those courses, you get certain certifications as well as BLAZE University certificates that you can post on LinkedIn,” he says.

“At the end of the day, it’s gonna be servicing those budtenders, those inventory managers as well to say, Look, I went in and I got certified in this software. I know what I’m doing here. Um, that’s the whole idea behind BLAZE University and we’re, we’re really excited about it. We wanna continue to kind of build on that over time.”

Violas predicts other companies will continue to identify problems their customers face and scramble to develop and launch solutions. But with the total addressable U.S. dispensary market floating around 10,000, he also sees more technology companies expand into areas of the supply chain they may not have in the past. He sees a handful of groups continuing to swallow smaller players en route to becoming full seed-to-sale software companies.

After it secured $8 million in its series A funding round, BLAZE is already planning a series B round in the second half of 2023. When M&A activity once again gets buzzing, “I believe BLAZE to be the acquirer here,” Violas says.