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Fyllo: Connecting a Cannabis Flywheel

A consumer data marketplace. An advertising and promotions platform. A compliance tool. A regulatory database.

This is not a checklist of software and digital technologies that cannabis companies should consider, but rather an abbreviated form of what Fyllo (pronounced FEE–low) offers. Founded in 2019 after a $16 million seed round investment raise (with another $70 million raised in two subsequent rounds), the Chicago-based marketing and compliance technology company has built a portfolio of solutions through strategic acquisitions of and partnerships with companies inside and outside the cannabis industry. These include: CannaRegs (January 2020), OpenGov (January 2021), Semasio (April 2022), and NineSixteen (June 2022).

CEO of Fyllo Chad Bronstein in a blue jacket in front of a blurred out brick wall
Chad Bronstein, co-founder and CEO, Fyllo

Led by co-founder and CEO Chad Bronstein, the company is looking to bring a more “progressive way” to targeting cannabis consumers to better serve active cannabis companies and those looking to enter the space. And with nearly 9,000 brands leveraging Fyllo’s consumer data, Fyllo is seemingly doing as much as it can as quickly as it can.

Cannabis Analytics For Cannabis and Mainstream Clients

Fyllo is a data analytics company that can help brands and retailers tailor the retail experience to the type of consumer viewing a digital menu or visiting a physical location. While the company’s platform (currently) focuses on cannabis and CBD consumers, its dataset is attractive to cannabis and non-cannabis brands.

“[How] we hedged ourselves on the ability to grow as fast as we have, is that we have two clients: We have the cannabis client, and then the mainstream, Fortune 100 client,” Bronstein says.

Serving both cannabis and non-cannabis brands, Bronstein explains, is done through better audience segmentation and ad targeting (both digitally and in-store).

Fyllo’s data marketplace boasts being “the largest ecosystem of cannabis and CBD purchase data.” By cross-referencing purchase behavior with other anonymized demographic data, brands and retailers can explore how cannabis consumers navigate both the cannabis and mainstream markets. In turn, this allows for better ad targeting, Bronstein explains. 

This level of audience segmentation is especially compelling to non-cannabis brands looking to study and tap into the cannabis consumer market, as these people’s behaviors differ from mainstream consumers. For example, Fyllo highlights how cannabis consumers are 19 percent more likely to make impulse purchases, a data point especially relevant to CPG companies.

The recent acquisitions of Germany-based Semasio, an advertising targeting platform, and Delaware-incorporated NineSixteen, an retail display hardware and software company, deepen Fyllo’s ability to influence the cannabis retail experience at both the online and store level. Semasio brings better ad experiences through what the German company refers to as “audience, contextual, and brand fit” targeting, while bringing in NineSixteen adds retail hardware and software to Fyllo’s solution suite.

“That’s really the evolution of what we’re trying to do,” Bronstein says, “really own the retail experience, but also be able to understand the consumer that goes through that retail experience.”

Compliance Tools for Licensees + Regulators (And Mainstream Brands)

Despite its core competency being consumer data, Fyllo also supports its users with a compliance and regulatory database tool built out following the company’s acquisition of CannaRegs in early 2020. While those technologies might not seem to be complementary, Bronstein views it differently.

“Digital advertising is the industry’s clear pathway to growth, and brands need to have confidence that their ad creatives are not only reaching the right audiences, but also meeting state-by-state and market-by-market compliance requirements,” Bronstein said in a Jan. 17, 2020 press release about the CannaRegs acquisition.

The move into the regulatory tracking and compliance space “helped us a lot in terms of getting people comfortable” with Fyllo (and with the cannabis industry as a whole in the case of skittish mainstream brands), Bronstein shares today. The decision made sense for Fyllo’s cannabis customer base–if Fyllo can show they know compliance, then those customers will view Fyllo’s other solutions more favorably. “Create a good flywheel, make it easy and efficient for a company, then it makes sense for them to utilize your platform,” Bronstein explains.

“Our customers in [the regulatory solution] would be real estate companies, … compliance or any parts of the organization at any SSO, any mom-and-pop, any MSO and any law firm that has a cannabis practice,” he notes.

While Fyllo updated the user interface and integrated CannaRegs into its product suite, the bulk of the features and content remain unchanged: State, county and local regulations, scheduled meetings, drafts and notes are all updated on the platform, allowing licensees to quickly react to an ever-shifting regulatory landscape, and permitting non-cannabis users to gain a better understanding of the limitations around cannabis marketing (and opportunities they might be able to capitalize on in mainstream markets).

“Where we’re at today is we are the largest platform of national scale … [scouring] the most jurisdictions, bar none…” Bronstein says.

Growing the Flywheel

While the company has grown at a rapid clip, even extending its compliance and regulatory tracking services into the cryptocurrency and short-term rental markets, Bronstein wants to ensure the company’s focus isn’t lost in the excitement of M&A activity and growth.

The goal, Bronstein explains, is to bring these analytics and retail advertising solutions into one single tech stack.

“Over the next year you’ll see our retail network really grow, which is [why] we bought the screen company, and you’ll see us really focused on evolving … all our [platforms] that we’ve acquired and how now they’re coming to that one single stack platform.” 

In his vision, a Fyllo customer would be able to identify target consumers based on specific niches, tailor digital ad content to that customer type, place those digital ads in the most relevant positions through audience, context, and brand fit targeting, and bring those digital ads into the retail location through in-store displays, and do all of this while maintaining compliance with state and local regulators in only one software platform. 

“We’re really excited because I think where Fyllo wants to be and currently is [at is] the next stage of unique data,” Bronstein says. “You have the old school way, and then you have this progressive way, and that’s what Fyllo is bringing to market.”

Brian MacIver

Brian MacIver

Brian MacIver is a freelance writer and editor based in Vancouver, British Columbia. He also is Partner and Director of Strategic Communications for Guerrera: The Agency, a boutique communications and marketing agency serving small businesses, nonprofits and progressive groups. He can be reached at [email protected]

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