Surfside Raises $4 Million for its Cannabis Data Activation Platform

NEW YORK — Surfside, marketing platform turning first party customer data into personalized marketing for the cannabis industry, today announced it has raised $4 million in Seed funding. Casa Verde led the round and Karan Wadhera, the firm’s Managing Partner, will join Surfside’s Board of Directors.

Surfside launched at the beginning of 2019 and has technology to help cannabis brands and dispensaries reach customers by delivering advertisements across connected devices. The technology is the only purpose-built engine to enable privacy-safe data onboarding and management of customer first-party data, allowing advertisers to build audiences based on their existing customers, tap into Surfside’s customer graph of cannabis consumers, and tie all marketing back to in-store sales, online sales and other conversion metrics like store visitation.

Providing an upgrade to existing technologies, the marketing suite combines the intelligence and insight capabilities of a customer data platform with the actionable layer of a demand side platform, bringing new efficiencies to how customer data can be activated and measured to drive personalized and effective marketing. Surfside’s  understanding of the cannabis consumer (purchase behavior, lifestyle, etc.), enables companies to target and influence in-market cannabis consumers based on their buying habits and near-market consumers based on their likely product and store preferences.

“We’ve spent quite a bit of time assessing marketing and data opportunities in cannabis, given it’s such a pain point for businesses in our industry,” said Karan Wadhera. “We chose Surfside based on their robust technology offering, experienced team, and the stellar performance they provide to customers. Casa Verde is excited to participate in the strategic evolution of the Surfside platform.” 

The past 12 months have brought on significant growth for the company, nearing 1,000 dispensaries and over 100 brands using Surfside’s technology. The offering has also expanded to support the majority of point-of-sale, CRM, e-commerce, delivery and other customer-focused integrations for the purpose of data onboarding and sales attribution. The recent release of the Clean Room data source makes it possible for clients to securely handle data onboarding without compromising user privacy, through an intuitive interface and client side-encryption that ensures data is onboarded without ever sharing raw attributes, something unprecedented in the cannabis space.

“We are focused on building the leading privacy-safe solution to unify customer data across marketing and customer-centric touchpoints, allowing clients to solve the challenges of customer acquisition and user retention across tightly regulated industries such as cannabis,” said Michael Blanche, co-founder of Surfside. “With this investment from Casa Verde, we’ll be able to significantly grow headcount, offer new services and accelerate product development.”

(This information is primarily sourced from Surfside.  Highly Capitalized has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this news release. Read our Disclaimer here).