Charles Ramsey is seeking his fortune in what he calls “the gold rush of the 21st century,” also known as the legal marijuana industry.
As founder and CEO of Agrisoft Development Group, Ramsey doesn’t produce or sell marijuana. But his Kansas City firm’s regulatory compliance software has a growing list of clients whose businesses legally provide it to consumers.
While several states now allow medical marijuana,and two permit recreational pot use, they require legal marijuana growers and dispensaries to comply with strict guidelines that demand transparency at each step of the process. That’s where Agrisoft’s “seed to sale” software comes in, Ramsey said.
“The software literally tracks everything,” he said, “from the moment the plant’s cloned to the moment it’s in the hand of the patient or user.”
The software monitors the cultivating, harvesting, drying, trimming and packaging of marijuana plants “down to the gram,” Ramsey said. And when customers pay at a dispensary, they should soon be able to use a cash kiosk integrated with Agrisoft tracking software.
The company recently partnered with kiosk maker C4EverSystems to work withbanks in several states to institute the new system, if only to ease the minds of nervous bankers.
“Otherwise, when you have these massive $100,000 deposits, you don’t know where that cash came from,” Ramsey said. “How much of it came from legitimate, regulated sales? How much of it might have come from possible black market or gray market sales of the product?”
Ramsey was a successful builder of medical software before launching Agrisoft in 2013. But as far back as 2010, he was pitching the concept of tracking software to the legal marijuana industry.
“There was a massive amount of investment money being poured into the cannabis industry at that time, and there still is,” he said. “But you’d talk to people and they were like, ‘Eh, we don’t want to fund software.’ It wasn’t sexy enough, I guess.”
Ramsey’s “lightbulb moment” came one Sunday night while watching a “60 Minutes” news segment that featured veteran law enforcement figure Matt Cook, author and implementer of Colorado’s pioneering medical marijuana regulatory system. The next day, Ramsey reached out to Cook, who told him the industry needed better software.
That was enough for Ramsey to quickly move forward with Agrisoft, which also gained instant credibility by having Cook sign on as company COO. That helped to open “some very deepinvestment pockets,” Ramsey said, “and we began our software.”
Agrisoft is certainly making money, Ramsey said, but the company has a larger aim.
“Our primary goal is market share attainment, even over profit,” he said. “We want to be the primary company that’s synonymous with technology in the cannabis industry within 12 months. We want to help this be a legitimate industry.”
