Online E-Commerce Cannabis Platform Tradiv Closes Up Shop

Tradiv is closing up shop after a very wild ride in the online wholesale marketplace side of the industry. Tradiv was one of the first online wholesale marketplaces to open up shop in Colorado. Their meteoric rise at the beginning kicked off by mingling technology with brokering cannabis products. According to their website, they connected cannabis producers with dispensaries in order to help these businesses with their supply chain management. 

Tradiv History

The Tradiv story began in Southern California between two fraternity brothers who met in the Midwest during college. They launched the platform and initially had trouble getting it off the ground due to most their investment dollars going directly to cultivators and dispensaries. Adding to their predicament, most investments were small and hard to find in 2014. This led them to an ArcView group meeting where they met the founders of CanopyBoulder. They were then accepted into the first class of CanopyBoulder and moved operations to Colorado to build the business.
 
They launched their site with a power-packed group of investors in October 2015 and saw immediate success in Colorado. They began to trade at a fast clip with quick adoption on their platform, which led them to their need for a Series A funding to grow their operations. The early success launched Tradiv into the industry quickly and allowed it to earn a name in the industry. Success came with its challenges as problems began to arise immediately after winning Inc’s 30 under 30. Like a magazine cover curse, it seems that at this point things shifted for the worse for the company.
 
According to an employee, Tradiv founder Aeron Sullivan decided to hire a professional CEO in order to help manage growth and operations.Sullivan hired Todd Palmieri as the company chief executive. The employee told Green Market Report that this is about the time when problems started to arise in the company and it was apparent something was wrong. According to the employee, Palmieri and Sullivan decided to move out all operations out of Colorado and make a major bet on California. During this big move is also when employees started to see a change in Sullivan. The employee suggested that it appeared that there was some form of mental illness going on due to odd comments that Sullivan was making in public.
After these episodes, the Board and the other co-founder requested a motion to ask Palmieri, and Sullivan to resign and step down from their roles. They were able to secure their removal from the company at the end of 2016, and the process began to reign in the unnecessary spending and activity that was caused by the top executives. Most of the staff was reduced and a comeback effort was initiated. At the beginning of January, the company moved operations back to Colorado and pivoted to a subscription model. However, the damage that was done by the prior management and saving the company was not a possibility.
As of today, Green Market Report has learned that they will be closing down officially on December 31st, 2017. All founders, and the current CEO were contacted for comment but we have not received a call back yet. GMR will update the story as their commentary is provided.

Debra Borchardt

Debra Borchardt is the Co-Founder, and Executive Editor of GMR. She has covered the cannabis industry for several years at Forbes, Seeking Alpha and TheStreet. Prior to becoming a financial journalist, Debra was a Vice President at Bear Stearns where she held a Series 7 and Registered Investment Advisor license. Debra has a Master's degree in Business Journalism from New York University.


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The Green Market Report focuses on the financial news of the rapidly growing cannabis industry. Our target approach filters out the daily noise and does a deep dive into the financial, business and economic side of the cannabis industry. Our team is cultivating the industry’s critical news into one source and providing open source insights and data analysis


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