Why Cura could be Oregon's first cannabis unicorn
By Pete Danko, Portland Business Journal
January 10, 2017
Upheaval might be rolling through Oregon cannabis, but you wouldn’t know it visiting Cura Cannabis Solutions’
bustling headquarters in the Central Eastside Industrial District.
On one side of the vast space, near the gently psychedelic mural that stretches 123 feet wide and 23 feet high
across one wall, four or five employees tap away at laptops, undeterred by the music in the background.
On the other side, amid shipping containers, stacked boxes and shelves of filled bins, various crews package products.
More employees quietly work upstairs in an uncluttered loft office.
This is Oregon’s biggest cannabis company — California’s too, now, according to the founders. Nevada might
be next on its list.
With a singular commitment to cannabis oil production and products, Cura says it had sales of $40.5 million in
2017. It recently closed a $12.8 million funding round, based on a $200 million valuation, but that’s very much a
moving target: Revenue is projected to rise to $120 million this year, and CEO Nitin Khanna said a new
investment round — perhaps $5 million to $10 million — could soon double the valuation to $400 million.
The unabashed goal is to become the country's first $1 billion cannabis company, a global leader, “the Nike of
cannabis,” as its leadership duo puts it.
“Wouldn’t that be great for Oregon?” asked Cameron Forni, Cura’s peripatetic president, who bounces
seemingly nonstop between Portland and Cura's outposts in California and Nevada like a kid stuck on a
trampoline.
It’s a question that is raised. The company has a hard-charging style that — off the record — rubs some in the
we’re-all-in-this-together Oregon cannabis industry the wrong way.
“Some people can misinterpret focus for aggression,” Forni responded when asked about that, adding that
"having a big market share of course makes you a big target."
Khanna said the industry benefits from having a “strong, profitable player” who can do things like extend
payment terms to retailers and guarantee steady income to processor partners. Plus, he argued, in the way
beer distributors can afford to tote a few cases of a craft beer all around the state because Anheuser Busch
has loaded the truck with Bud and Michelob, Cura’s mass products can boost the viability of boutique cannabis
brands.
The company is the product of an April 2016 merger of cannabis enterprises born around the time Oregonians
voted for legalization in November 2014.
Forni had created Select Oil, a vape cartridge brand, and built it into a $100,000 a month business with his wife
out of their Pearl District living room. Khanna, who with his brother sold the software company Saber Corp. for
$420 million in 2007, was heading up a small venture that “had a retail store, a grow under development and a
CO2 extraction machine.”
The two came together believing that cannabis oils — not flower, and not a vertically integrated company —
were the best growth opportunity.
Produced in various forms and through a range of processes, these cannabis concentrates are popularly used
in vaping, but also in edibles, drinks and an ever-increasing array of products. Cura’s biggest seller is a
cartridge called Select Elite, which costs about $60 at retail and provides around 250 puffs.
The company got a toehold in the market in 2016 with what it said was an intense focus on building a “clean”
supply chain heading into the fall, when pesticide testing regulations temporarily derailed nearly all its
competitors. It kept growing with a business model that, in addition to its own production, includes partnering
with processors who take Cura-sourced cannabis and follow Cura protocols.
“What you see today, this juggernaut, is as much a function of supply as it is how we do selling,” Khanna said.
He credits Ken White, the director of manufacturing who joined the company a year ago, with bringing in
“technology and methodology that allowed us to become the highest-volume, lowest-cost producer instantly.”
Citing BDS Analytics data, the company leadership said it has 43 percent of the Oregon consumer market, and
a slightly larger share of the wholesale oils market.
And those markets have been growing: According to BDS,
concentrates and edibles, combined, made up 40 percent of Oregon retail sales in November 2017 by dollar
value, up from 29 percent a year earlier, as flower gave up ground.
Having conquered Oregon, Cura began building operations in California early last year in the medical market,
and sales there were on a steep upward trajectory — rising from $1.4 million in November to $3.2 million in
December — even before the recreational side opened up this month. It expanded into Nevada a few months
after California.
To both drive and keep up with the growth, Cura has been hiring at a frantic pace — it ballooned from 200 to
285 employees in the past month alone. Included among the new hires: a CFO, a vice president of brands and
a California general manager, all based in Portland.
Along with mining the California and Nevada markets, the company has its eye on Washington and Arizona,
Khanna said, in its march toward unicorn status.
“In Oregon we’ve got athletic apparel, we’ve got Silicon Forest, we’ve got the craft wine and beer industries,” he
said. “But I think we have a chance to show that an Oregon cannabis company can expand and dominate other
states.”
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