Medical marijuana venture Vireo Health is seeking $31.5 million in equity financing as it prepares to expand into more states. According to CEO Dr. Kyle Kingsley, the Minneapolis-based parent company of Minnesota Medical Solutions (MinnMed) is close to reeling in $6 million of that amount.

As of today, Vireo’s staff has a headcount of nearly 50 employees but expects its staff to expand ten-fold in the upcoming years. Vireo is largely targeting individual investors as opposed to institutional funds, an approach it used to bankroll its original launch in Minnesota and New York.

The final months of life for Jacob Securities Inc. were marred by capital deficiencies, compliance violations, a senior executive’s abrupt exit and employees being locked out of the office, according to documents released Tuesday.

Amid the pandemonium, the Toronto-based broker dealer was still trying to raise money for a new fund, say documents from the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC). On Dec. 18, IIROC announced it had suspended Jacob Securities’ membership, which effectively put the dealer out of business.

“We disagree with both the characterizations and the outcome of the report, and we are weighing our options,” Sasha Jacob, founder and chief executive officer of Jacob Securities, said in an interview.

For years, these nuns have been attempting to make the cannabis market ‘a healing industry instead of a stoner industry’, and who can blame them?

The Sisters of the Valley have been fighting back against the Merced city bosses in California, to continue running their modest garage weed farm and make marijuana products to sell on their Etsy store.

Officials recently decided to ban medicinal weed and it’s not gone down well with these Sisters. Since the ruling last week, they’ve started a petition to protect weed rights in California’s central valley, and their thriving business of course.

The farming of medical marijuana is loosening in Latin America just as steadily—actually, a bit more so—than here in the US. In Chile, the laws are a bit strange (possession, sale, and transport of recreational marijuana is illegal), but as of 2015, it's legal to cultivate the crop and to sell it in stores as a prescription medication.

Wherever legalization goes, money and development follow, and so last week we saw the official opening of Latin America’s largest medical marijuana farm, a totally legal operation a few hours south of Santiago that hopes to harvest about 1.65 tons of marijuana this spring.

Legal marijuana is the fastest-growing industry in the United States and if the trend toward legalization spreads to all 50 states, marijuana could become larger than the organic food industry, according to a new report obtained by The Huffington Post.

Researchers from The ArcView Group, a cannabis industry investment and research firm based in Oakland, California, found that the U.S. market for legal cannabis grew 74 percent in 2014 to $2.7 billion, up from $1.5 billion in 2013.

Bill would create a list of acceptable products for growers to use

The beer industry is keeping close tabs on the growth of legalized marijuana in the US, and for good reason: The cannabis industry is gunning to displace alcohol as a safer and healthier alternative.

Beer already competes with wine and liquor for what some analysts cutely refer to as “share of buzz,” but with recreational use of marijuana legalized in four US states—and as many as six voting in 2016 on whether to join them—competition stands to toughen.

Had the South Metro Denver Chamber’s economic forecast breakfast occurred in a different year, the speakers may have been the same, but the message may not have been. As it was, the speakers at this annual economic worship session were bullish on 2016.

“Colorado is the fourth fastest growing economy, eighth in terms of state population growth,” said  Dr. Richard Wobbekind, executive director of the Business Research Division and  senior associate dean for academic programs at the University of Colorado. “We’ve seen strong employment growth across every sector except energy and mining. In fact, the category of greatest growth is software programming.”

Let’s say you’ve just come up with that brilliant-but-practical cannabis idea that’s going to get you your share of the explosive new marijuana industry. Here’s the problem: perhaps you have insufficient business experience and you’re not exactly flush with cash.

We’re talking about the ways states can get marijuana legalized; new developments in the push for social pot use in Colorado; and the Women Grow Leadership Summit 2016 that’s happening in Denver Feb. 3-5. Another burning question: Is Colorado at risk of losing its place as the national leader in cannabis?