Debra BorchardtOctober 24, 2019
Akerna Corp. (NASDAQ: KERN), a leading cannabis compliance technology company, has made a strategic investment for an undisclosed amount in ZolTrain, a training platform built for the mobile world. ZolTrain was founded 10 years ago by Jan Cole who recognized that an educated budtender delivered a measurable boost to sales. It is an online, on-demand training platform that gets budtenders the knowledge they need to sell cannabis products.
“Our strategy at Akerna is to accelerate our organic growth with strategic acquisitions and investments that are complementary to our business and drive recurring revenue. ZolTrain is the first of these investments,” said Jessica Billingsley, chief executive officer, Akerna. “ZolTrain is important to the maturation of the industry, enabling greater consumer, product, and public safety through education. MJ Platform is the only technology solution that can address tracking and compliance and, through our investment in ZolTrain, improve the customer experience by pairing education with product information at the point of sale.”
By integrating ZolTrain with the MJ Freeway platform, Akerna said that its customers can educate budtenders, track their training and have a resource at the point of sale. MJ Platform users can sign up for Zoltrain now and the integration with MJ Platform will be completed in December.
“As a dispensary owner, I was struck by the challenges of not only keeping my budtenders and staff up to date on brand information but also engaged with the content. Depending on the dispensary, a budtender can be working with anywhere from 200 to 1,000 products. It would be impossible to maintain that much product information,” said Jan Cole, founder, ZolTrain. “Now, with this integrated solution, a budtender can take a tutorial in less than sixty seconds on their smartphone and have access to product information through MJ Platform at the point of sale. In my experience, an educated budtender, making the right recommendations to customers, facilitates compliance and drives loyalty.”
