Cannabis industry took on over $1 billion in investments during January alone

The cannabis industry keeps glowing on up, taking $1.2 billion in investments in January 2018 alone. Benzinga, a platform that follows financial markets and investments, reported on the trend:

“Over the first five weeks of 2018, the Viridian Cannabis Deal Tracker registered $1.23 billion in investments in the cannabis industry, Viridian Capital President Scott Greiper told Benzinga. This compares to $178 million for the first five weeks of 2017, implying a growth in investments of almost 600 percent. Even more interestingly, the amount of money that came into the industry in January alone is pretty close to that seen over the entirety of 2016, when investments totaled $1.29 billion.”

Basically, weed companies took on as much money in the first month of 2018 that they took in all of 2016. Them some numbers.

Obviously there’s a bunch of money in cannabis from a purchasing standpoint, people are buying all the pot. The cannabis industry is so strong that it’s estimated to be worth $21 billion by 2020.

Now, it appears that investors are starting to get hip to pot, putting millions into cannabis businesses.

Harrison Phillips, Vice President at Viridian Capital Advisors, a cannabis-dedicated financial advisory firm, told Benzinga about the recent trend:

“We are seeing a steady maturation of the capital markets around the cannabis industry. Early on, it was almost entirely high net worth individuals — and maybe a few family offices — investing in the cannabis space. Now, we are seeing more family offices getting involved, more high net worth individuals, more professional investors getting involved.”

But as we’ve seen throughout the cannabis industry, people are still hesitant to fully get into the space with regulatory and legal issues floating around. Phillips went on to explain that investors are putting personal money into the space as opposed to using their firms’ bread.

“They are not necessarily investing in behalf of the firms they work with. We also know several private equity and venture capital groups that are out of the cannabis space, but actively looking for ways to play. And there are other big financial groups that are highly interested.”

Cannabis might be the safest financial play out right now. It’s lit.