Indian-canadian sets up platform to fund cannabis businesses
TORONTO: A new accelerator and capital fund headed by an Indian-canadian woman is looking to speed up innovation in the cannabis industry in Canada and create opportunities in the recently-legalised sector.
While cannabis for medical use was legal in Canada earlier, it became the first G-7 nation to legalise it for recreational use in October.
Later that month, Barinder Rasode co-founded Grow Tech Labs, a Vancouver-based accelerator, of which she is the CEO.
“Because this is a new industry and we are dealing with the challenges of supply, high-quality cannabis, processing and packaging, the industry requires innovation to deal with the pain points,” she said.
Grow Tech has already funded one company that is now working on technology “around the growing of cannabis because we realised the supply shortages and the quality of the product have become quite a big conversation”, Rasode said.
Formally, though, the first cohort of that will be in its inaugural Accelerating Cannabis Innovation Program that will take shape in January.
Grow Tech isn’t Rasode’s first foray in the cannabis industry.
In April 2017, she founded the National Institute for Cannabis Health and Education to foster “a conversation between the cannabis industry and mainstream business professionals and health associations.”
For Rasode, who was born in Ludhiana and grew up in Kamloops, British Columbia, another goal is to facilitate diversity within the fledgling industry while creating openings for visible minorities: women and indigenous entrepreneurs.
“We want to create equal opportunities for those groups that might traditionally have faced barriers,” the 49-year-old mother of three said.