Cannabis software startup Brytemap raises $1.5M, hires Scott Denholm as COO

Brytemap, a software company that created a retail platform the cannabis industry, raised $1.5 million at the end of May.

And on June 18, the company announced a big hire: Scott Denholm will join Brytemap as chief operating officer. Denholm worked previously as executive director of Franwell Inc.’s Marijuana Enforcement, Tracking Reporting and Compliance (METRC) Program, a seed-to-sale, track-and-trace platform for cannabis.

Bryan Lopez, the founder and CEO of the Hunt Valley, Maryland-based Brytemap, said in an interview that the company raised the funding from over 30 friends and family members. Lopez is from Parkville, as is Sales Engineer Bill Weber. Lopez and Weber are lifelong friends.

“This idea was really born out of a conversation over some beers one day,” he said. “The whole company is built around a lot of friends and family.”

Brytemap software tracks plants from seed to sale. Plants are required to be tracked with a unique, 24-digit, alphanumeric RFID tag purchased from METRC and are embedded with an RFID chip.

Lopez said growers and sellers badly need software to make their compliance work more efficient, and that Brytemap makes the process easier.

“The challenge that we’re solving is we’re eliminating a lot of the manual processes,” he said. “You would be shocked to see the paper and clipboards [people use] to manage their multimillion-dollar grow operations.”

Lopez said he wants to move beyond being just an efficient compliance tool to one businesses can use to make data-driven decisions to improve their products.

“What we’re trying to do with our software is we’re giving growers the capability of entering different kinds of data,” he said. That includes the type of strain, the type of dirt, amount of water, amount of sunlight and other factors.

Including full-time contractors, Lopez said Brytemap employs 15 people. The company has clients in Maryland and Washington, but the CEO has ambitions to go international.

“It’s a tremendous boost,” Lopez said of the hiring of Denholm, who he described as “the guy who wrote the book for the states on compliance.”

“The most important thing is it’s going to bring a tremendous amount of new credibility to our company,” he said.