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FORTUNE.COM // DECEMBER 2019
WHERE
THERE’S
SMOKE
AFTER A BACCHANA LIAN
banquet served on
two thick planks at The Chase, a
chandelier-filled rooftop Dorsia
in downtown Toronto, the C-suite
squad of Fyllo, a Chicago-based
marijuana ad-tech startup, is on
the restaurant’s patio for post-
prandial indulgences in booze and
reefer madness.
Michael Chock, Fyllo’s chief
operating officer, exhales after a particularly athletic puff of a
weedy vape pen and takes in the scene. “What’s not to like about a
day like today?” he says as smoke spills through his ear-to-ear grin.
Fortune takes a puff—and nods.
The executives have come to MJBizCon, a banner international
marijuana business conference, riding a company high: $16 mil-
lion in seed funding from giants such as JW Asset Management
and K2 Venture Capital, with another $2 million on the way. Their
good fortune doesn’t stop there: Lorne Gertner of Hill & Gertner
Capital, one of a few so-called godfathers of cannabis, has joined
the board of directors. Partnership requests from Curaleaf, Fancy
Weed, and A Proper High—“the Vanity Fair of weed reviews,” says
Chock—await their attention. That afternoon, the executives take a
meeting with Twitter—Katie Ford, Twitter’s head of global brands,
is already on Fyllo’s board. Fyllo’s leadership team has managed to
VENTURE
wow what’s known in marijuana investment
circles as Toronto’s “Bay Street mafia.” Not bad
for a Thursday.
The bulk of Fyllo’s appeal is an online plat-
form called CannaBrain: a detailed compen-
dium, zip code by zip code, of the fractured
U.S. legal landscape that enables automated
compliance and advertising. While breathless
headlines huff and puff about legalization,
investment, product development, and sales,
Fyllo operates one step ahead: managing
the tedious logistics of advertising, distribu-
tion, growth, labeling, licensure, marketing,
and other unsexy minutiae of the cannabis
business.
Navigating the patchwork
of laws around marijuana is
enough to make any cannabis
entrepreneur’s head spin.
Chicago’s Fyllo says it has the
an s w er. By Richard Morgan
Fyllo chief
operating
officer Michael
Chock takes
a puff outside
the company’s
Chicago HQ.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LUCY HEWETT
