Feature · checked 29 September 2026
The cannabis tracking software that went to Nasdaq and was sold back out.
A Denver seed-to-sale compliance company, listed on Stompstart in 2019 with a consulting pitch, that reached Nasdaq through a June 2019 SPAC merger as Akerna and was sold off in February 2024 when its parent became Gryphon Digital Mining.
MJ Freeway's card on Stompstart's page of Denver startups, captured in July 2019, gave the company two faces. Its pitch was "cannabis compliance software." Its description was about people: "MJ Freeway cannabis consultants have made our clients' dreams come true," it said, offering help with winning licenses, optimising businesses, increasing revenue and passing inspections. The card tagged the company under Cannabis Consulting and Marijuana Consultants, and still gave its stage as private beta.
By then MJ Freeway was nine years old and had just become part of a public company. A release filed with the SEC in June 2019 describes it as a Denver seed-to-sale compliance technology provider, established in 2010, whose MJ Platform and Leaf Data Systems software had tracked more than $15 billion in cannabis sales.
Two years before that it had made national news for a different reason. In January 2017 an attack took out both MJ Freeway's production and backup servers, Fortune reported, in what chief executive Amy Poinsett called an "unprecedented malicious attack." The company said no customer or patient information had been stolen, but that large amounts of data had been corrupted, and that it had received no ransom demand. It served more than 1,000 clients, Fortune said.
On 17 June 2019 MJ Freeway completed a merger with MTech Acquisition Corp., a blank-check company focused on buying businesses ancillary to the cannabis industry, creating Akerna Corp. Akerna began trading on Nasdaq the next day under the ticker KERN. Former MJ Freeway holders owned about 62.7 percent of the combined company. Co-founder Jessica Billingsley became chief executive, and the release called her the first chief executive to take a cannabis regulatory compliance technology company to Nasdaq.
Akerna did not keep the business for five years. On 28 April 2023 it announced a merger with Gryphon Digital Mining and, conditional on that merger, the sale of its software business, covering MJ Freeway with its MJ Platform and Leaf Data Systems brands as well as Ample Organics, to a buyer named MJ Freeway Acquisition Co for $5 million in cash.
The filing on the closing describes the sale differently. On 9 February 2024, it says, Akerna sold all the membership interests in MJ Freeway, LLC to MJ Acquisition Corp. for about $1.2 million, together with the conversion into shares of a $1.65 million loan that buyer had advanced to Akerna in instalments from April 2023. The same day Akerna completed its merger and took the name Gryphon Digital Mining, Inc. The 2023 release and the 2024 filing name the buyer differently, and neither says how the two names relate or who owns them.
The software is still sold. The old mjfreeway.com address redirects to MJ Platform, which offers seed-to-sale software for cannabis cultivation, manufacturing, distribution, retail and delivery. The site says it has tracked $20 billion in cannabis sales across 33 states and 14 countries, and its footer reads "©2026 MJ Freeway."