FundCanna Launches Buy Now, Pay Later Platform for Cannabis Vendors, Clients
Written by Eli Walsh- San Diego Business Journal
SOLANA BEACH – The legal cannabis market in the U.S. is estimated to generate roughly $35 billion annually, but many businesses like cultivators and dispensaries continue to face challenges accessing standard financial services.
That’s largely due to discrepancies between state laws legalizing cannabis use and commercial sales and regulations by the federal government, which still considers cannabis to be a Schedule 1 drug, thus having no currently accepted medical utility and a high potential for abuse. Other Schedule 1 drugs include heroin, LSD and ecstasy.
As a result of that difference in regulation, offering financial services to cannabis businesses can be a complex and overly risky task for major banks. According to Adam Stettner, CEO of the financial services company FundCanna, the biggest issues facing the cannabis industry are financial.
“The first is taxation, that would be resolved with rescheduling,” he said. “The other top issue is delinquent accounts receivable, which is, in a $35 billion industry, a $4 billion problem. So call it somewhere between 11 and 12% of this industry is delinquent on their receivables or people really are not paying bills on time.”
FundCanna’s primary purpose is to bridge the financial gap for cannabis businesses, providing lines of credit, financing for third-party vendors, working capital loans, equipment financing and inventory funding support for dispensaries.
According to Stettner, of the roughly 10,000-to-12,000 banks and credit unions in the U.S., just under 1,000 serve cannabis businesses as deposit institutions, though that is up from around 400 in 2021.
Making matters more complicated for cannabis businesses is a lack of access to loan services from standard commercial banks, which already decline loan requests from roughly 75% to 80% of their small- and medium-sized business depositor clients.
“What I can say about cannabis is if only give or take 10% of institutions are accepting deposits, and we know that all bank institutions for SMBs are only approving 20-to-25% of their deposit base, I can say that you’ve got a very, very low single-digit approval rate form the banks that are servicing cannabis in terms of lending, and almost all of the time they’re lending only on real estate,” Stettner said.
FundCanna has also sought to reduce the accounts receivable issues faced by a not-insignificant number of cannabis businesses.
Last year, the company soft launched ReadyPaid, a buy now, pay later platform for cannabis vendors and their clients. Sellers can receive immediate payment up front for their product through ReadyPaid, while buyers have up to six months to pay for that product on a timeline that best matches their revenue cycle.
According to FundCanna, ReadyPaid has led to a 45% increase in average order size for cannabis vendors while providing more purchasing power for buyers.
“It eradicates AR and delinquencies of the same, and buyers have time to pay, which eliminates the point of friction, the frustration and the impossibility of paying for something that hasn’t yet derived revenue,” Stettner said.
FundCanna initially announced ReadyPaid in September 2024, but the platform itself was a stripped back version of what the company ultimately aimed to build and offer.
At that time, FundCanna had the resources to handle the financial aspects of ReadyPaid, but the technology itself wasn’t fully built out until only a handful of weeks ago, according to Stettner.
Since the platform’s full launch, however, FundCanna has already signed nearly 150 sellers as ReadyPaid users and completed seven figures in transactions in under a month.
“The feedback has been positive and I’m really excited,” Stettner said. “I think ‘26 is when we’ll be at full speed on ReadyPaid, so we’ll use Q4 to continue rolling out the technology, continue signing sales partners. Our goal is to have a few hundred by the end of the year.”
FundCanna has worked with companies in the cannabis industry, ranging from cultivators in legal cannabis states to nutrient providers and lighting vendors in states where cannabis remains illegal for recreational use, in some 45 states.
Stettner argued that FundCanna would ultimately benefit from the federal government rescheduling cannabis to a lower regulatory level or even fully legalizing it for recreational use nationwide. Allowing wide access to traditional banking would serve as a major support system for the company, he said.
“I want that, but I don’t think it’s going to happen rapidly, I don’t think it will happen widely,” Stettner said. “And I think it’s unfair for people to think that if this moves from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3, that all of a sudden the floodgates open and banks come rushing in.”
Overall, FundCanna’s sales have grown roughly 500% since 2022 from roughly $17 million to the nearly $100 million the company is on pace for this year.
Much of the company’s recent growth has been driven less by states making cannabis use legal than by vendors in the industry learning how FundCanna operates and that the company is trustworthy.
“Every new industry, every nascent industry, is skeptical of someone that comes in and makes a commitment or a promise to solve issues, and this industry in particular is a bit more skeptical,” Stettner said.
“So we’ve seen growth and wider adoption of what we offer,” he added. “I think it’s a little less geographic than it is the fact that we’re working really hard to deliver on our commitments and we aren’t hiding anything and we really do want to support this industry.”
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