Armored Cars And Facial Recognition: Meet The Startups Securing California’s Pot Industry
As the industry expands, so does the needs to support it
A pair of California business partners thinks they’ve found their niche in the burgeoning cannabis industry: Armored cars that move money and marijuana across the state.
Because marijuana is still illegal on the federal level, few banks will open accounts for marijuana businesses, meaning most operate entirely in cash. To buy supplies or pay taxes, they need to move that cash.
Then there’s the products themselves — marijuana plants, edibles, CBD oil, associated equipment, all valuable in themselves.
“We’re either going to triple or quadruple in size in 2018,” when sales of recreational marijuana begin in California, Hardcar Security CEO Todd Kleperis said.
Founded in late 2015, the Palm Springs-based company generated “a few hundred thousand” dollars in revenue in 2016 and will be “well into a million” in 2017, Kleperis said.
They have eight full-time and 20 part-time employees — most of whom Kleperis expects to bring on full time after recreational sales begin in California on Jan. 2, and most of whom are military veterans.
Kleperis said Hardcar has 25 regular clients, most of them in northern California. His drivers move cannabis products from growers and manufacturers there to dispensaries in southern California.
Kleperis and COO Jeff Breier met more than a decade ago in China, where both worked in security technology. By 2015, both were closely watching the cannabis industry. They partnered and opened an office in the California desert, hoping to serve the fast-growing industry.
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