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Profile
Ryan G. Smith is the Executive Chairman of LeafLink. He first joined the company in 2015. LeafLink is the leading unified wholesale platform designed specifically for cannabis. They easily and efficiently sell, ship, pay, get paid, advertise and innovate.
Previously, Smith was a founder and president at Trupoly. Earlier in his career he worked with EcoCampus as a founder.
Smith earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy and international relations from Colgate University.
When Ryan G. Smith co-founded LeafLink in 2016, the company’s main goal was to streamline cannabis ordering, which was highly manual and error-prone. LeafLink streamlined the process through an e-commerce experience. On the marketplace, brands could easily update available inventory, and retailers could shop brands 24/7. Now, thanks to Ryan’s visionary leadership and drive, LeafLink supports 8,500+ businesses in 30 markets and processes $4.4B+ in annual orders through the marketplace, or 39% of US wholesale cannabis. As the CEO of LeafLink, it’s Ryan’s responsibility to stay one step ahead of the fast-shifting cannabis landscape in order to anticipate the industry’s needs and build solutions to help their clients succeed. Ryan has grown LeafLink into a robust B2B platform addressing the wholesale commerce, payment & working capital management, logistics and fulfillment, and business intelligence & marketing services. Many businesses have taken on one of these challenges in other sectors, but there has never been one company that centralizes all these services for an entire industry in a unified platform. By addressing each of these through technology, LeafLink is defining the cannabis industry for the future. In 2019, under Ryan’s leadership, LeafLink launched industry-changing tools to address challenges related to crediting, payments, and financing, and to bring liquidity to the industry. Because cannabis is still federally illegal, one of the most critical problems businesses face is limited access to capital and financial services. Since launch, over 500 businesses have used LeafLink’s payments tools to process over $100M in transactions. In 2020, the company launched a new solution to improve operational efficiency in wholesale shipping for the cannabis industry. The company launched a suite of advanced analytics products to give their clients a competitive advantage.