**New York, August 3, 2021** – Surfside, an end-to-end marketing platform turning first party customer data into personalized marketing for the cannabis industry, today announced it has raised $4 million in Seed funding. Casa Verde Capital led the round and Karan Wadhera, Managing Partner at Casa Verde Capital, will join Surfside’s Board of Directors. 

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Surfside launched at the beginning of 2019 and quickly became the leading technology helping cannabis brands and dispensaries reach new and existing customers by delivering advertisements across consumers’ connected devices. The platform is the only technology purpose-built to enable privacy-safe data onboarding and management of customer first-party data, allowing advertisers to build audiences based on their existing customers, tap into Surfside’s customer graph of current and potential cannabis consumers, and tie all marketing back to in-store sales, online sales and other conversion metrics like store visitation. 

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Providing an upgrade to existing marketing technologies, Surfside combines the intelligence and insight capabilities of a customer data platform with the actionable layer of a demand side platform, bringing new efficiencies to how customer data can be activated and measured to drive personalized and effective marketing. Their robust understanding of the cannabis consumer, what they purchase, where they visit, their lifestyle and behaviors, enables brands, dispensaries and ancillary services the ability to target and influence in-market cannabis consumers based on their buying habits and near-market consumers based on their likely product and store preference. 
 
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The past 18 months have brought on explosive growth for the company, with over 500 dispensaries now using the Surfside technology. The platform has been expanding to support a large number of point-of-sale, CRM, e-commerce, delivery and other customer-focused integrations for the purpose of data onboarding and sales attribution. The recent release of the Clean Room data source makes it possible for clients to securely handle data onboarding without compromising user privacy, through an intuitive interface and client side-encryption that ensures data is onboarded without ever sharing raw attributes, something unprecedented in the cannabis space.

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“We are focused on building the leading privacy-safe platform to unify customer data across marketing and customer-centric touchpoints, allowing clients to solve the challenges of customer acquisition and user retention across tightly regulated industries such as cannabis,” said Michael Blanche, co-founder of Surfside. “With this investment from Casa Verde Capital, we’ll be able to significantly grow headcount, offer new services and accelerate product development.”

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“We’ve been anxiously waiting to enter the advertising and data side of the cannabis space as the market opportunity is extremely attractive, and Surfside has built a forward-looking SaaS platform rather than renting or replicating existing mainstream solutions for the cannabis industry,” said Mr. Wadhera. “We chose Surfside based on their technology, team and performance. They’re the only purpose-built advertising technology in the cannabis space and they’ve been punching well above their weight for many years and outperforming technology from other industries and cannabis media companies that were better capitalized. Casa Verde Capital is excited to help contribute to Surfside’s strategic evolution and success ahead.”

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Surfside is currently focused on the cannabis industry where there is a significant need and opportunity to tie and measure online and in-store sales along with customer visitation patterns to advertising and marketing goals. Both co-founders, Jon Lowen and Michael Blanche, have over 15 years of experience in advertising and customer data technology with multiple successful exits and C-Level experience at a publicly traded NASDAQ company.

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“The cannabis industry was a perfect fit for Surfside’s technology due to our ability to partner with e-commerce and point-of-sale platforms early, which proved out the efficacy of our platform,” said Jon Lowen, co-founder of Surfside. “This new capital will help us roll out additional automation services and capabilities to help service all dispensary owners, brands and ancillary businesses looking for direct to consumer and B2B marketing and data solutions. And while we’re heavily invested in the cannabis industry today, we know that our platform will benefit other industries in the future as we provide performance in conjunction with compliance.”

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**About Surfside**\
Surfside is an end-to-end marketing technology that aggregates 1st party data across all customer touchpoints, allowing advertisers the ability to better understand, target and measure how to influence current and future customers. They are the only cannabis-focused customer data platform (CDP) with a complete view and opinion on the cannabis consumer, enabling Surfside customers to find and attract qualified consumers through monetization of their online and in-store audiences.

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Media Contact:

Scott Cianciulli\
The Plunkett Group\
(212) 739-6753\
scott@theplunkettgroup.com