Company LeafTrack.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: SMALL biz TECH STARTUP

INITIAL LIGHT BULB Two years ago, Reid Hanson was making a surfboard-inspired kid's bed in his garage listening to a story about Colorado's medical marijuana industry on the radio. He was in the process of deciding if he wanted to liquidate the vehicles and logistics equipment from a previous business, a consumer electronics installation company, and hatched a plan that evolved into "a seed-to-sale tracking system" for the medical marijuana providers.

"There's a lot of mistrust between business to business and business to government in this industry," Hanson says. "There's also a lot of misinformation. I wanted to provide third-party, unbiased data collection."

After discussing the issue with officials at the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment, Hanson launched LeafTrack in 2009. The company now has a dozen employees.

IN A NUTSHELL Using RFID tags and bar codes, LeafTrack allows users to track medical-marijuana plants through the grow cycle to delivery to dispensaries in Colorado-Tags remain on that plant and can be tied into sensor networks to allow growers to monitor temperature, carbon dioxide and air flow. At indoor grow facilities, "air quality is a big deal," says Hanson."If they're getting a higher yield in a specific part of a room, they want to reproduce that. The tag is like the anchor to tie all the data together."

The state likes it because it eliminates black-market transactions and helps hold growers and dispensaries accountable. "They're only collecting a fraction of what they could be," Hanson says. "They're looking for any money they can find - this is a fantastic way for the state to make a lot of money based on good data collection/'

But LeafTrack's customers are growers and dispensaries, who can demonstrate they are growing 70 percent of the...