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In 2019, Jeff Woods attended a presentation by Michael Colbourne, CEO and CTO of Neobi Technology. At the time, the data analytics platform was just a year old. Impressed by what Colbourne had to say, Woods bought him a drink and struck up a conversation. A spark was lit, and soon Woods (who is now the CRO and CFO of Neobi) and Colbourne were working to make Neobi Canada’s leading cannabis data platform.
Neobi provides real-time data to licensed cannabis producers to help increase sales via visual maps, custom reports and dashboards that track SKUs (stock keeping units). It monitors and evaluates the daily performance of 16,000 cannabis products — everything from strains and edibles to tinctures, joints, cartridges and disposable dab pens, plus related products such as bongs and rolling papers.
With this data, producers could then deduct what products are the best to supply, which provinces to distribute to and most importantly, find out who its customer base is. Neobi tracks information from approximately 2,900 retail locations, which is 85 per cent of the Canadian cannabis market. Some of its biggest clients include Tilray, Canopy Growth, Pure Sunfarms, Cronos Group and SNDL.
“We actually started hands on keyboards,” says Colbourne. “Now, there’s millions and millions of rows of data. So, that’s where we need AI and machine learning to help.”
Neobi was recently acknowledged as a Top 10 Innovator at the Platform Calgary 2023 Innovation Week and as a Top 20 Startup at the Startup TNT Summit VIII. The next step is expanding into Germany and U.S. markets.
“We’ve been walking for so long, we want to run now,” says Colbourne.
