Meadow: There’s Big Money In Selling A Little Weed

Don’t you just hate it when you try to open an illegal business but you face obstacles at every turn? While that is an incredible exaggeration of a somewhat realistic scenario, there is a software company that has stepped up to fill a definite need in a very specific industry.

Photo courtesy of psfk.com

In the US, medical marijuana and recreational marijuana are hotly contested issues. Several states have already legalized one or both uses for the natural “herb,” but the federal government still maintains a centuries-old iron grip of prohibition on the plant. That means that any legally operating marijuana dispensary–well, legal within its state–runs the serious risk of being targeted by the federal government, seemingly at random.

That’s posed a problem for businesses, of course, both in terms of legally meeting the requirements of their states in terms of running a legitimate retail business, but also in terms of working with certain business tools that will not accommodate any entity that operates outside the law (which dispensaries technically do). That’s why the founders of Meadow point-of-sale software have been working through various investment rounds in order to expand the capabilities of their product while still creating a retail tool that businesses can actually use.

Meadow operates as a video chat platform, allowing doctors to remotely conduct appointments for their patients. The required “medical cards” have been a source of criticism due to the public perception that anyone can get a prescription for weed if their money is good. Truthfully, the diagnoses that result in marijuana range from the horrors of chemo down to the inconvenience of periodic or episodic insomnia, which has made more than a few people skeptical about the veracity of the prescription process.

Unfortunately, the stark reality for the majority of medical marijuana patients is debilitating illness; the life-shattering conditions that lead many patients to resort to a quasi-legal and unapproved option can often mean dragging themselves in to see their doctors just to get a renewal isn’t feasible. Meadow launched with the video appointment system to allow doctors and patients to not only conduct the required appointment, but also to allow the doctor to email the prescription to his patient or directly to the patient’s preferred dispensary. The platform also began with a delivery system, an “Uber for weed” of sorts.

Now, with the latest investment round, Meadow will launch a POS system that helps dispensaries sell to their patients when other big names in retail software won’t work with them. Luckily for all stakeholders involved–from retail business owners down to bedridden patients–Meadow’s latest investment round garnered just over two million dollars, with donations from some well-known names in tech.