Former Meta and Microsoft engineers Jun Sup Lee and Vince C. Ning built Nabis into the country’s biggest marijuana distributor, delivering $1.5 billion worth of weed to dispensaries every year. Now it’s blooming in a fourth state.

In a windowless room in a rented warehouse in Oakland in 2019, Nabis cofounders Vince C. Ning and Jun Sup Lee, a few of their employees and a friend they met at the startup accelerator Y Combinator, Luana Lopes Lara (who would go on to cofound prediction market Kalshi and become one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires), were counting $2 million in cash by hand.

The money was earmarked for marijuana excise taxes in California. San Francisco-based Nabis had recently launched as a cannabis distributor during the medical marijuana heyday of the country’s biggest weed market and it was Ning and Lee’s job to collect and pay taxes on the product they delivered to retailers. The duo had hired an armed guard to watch the door. Once the cash was counted, banded and bagged, Ning put the money into two suitcases, $1 million in each, threw on a Hawaiian shirt—he thought he was less likely to get mugged if he looked like a tourist, but in the end he looked more like a scrawny narco-wannabe—and headed to the state government building to deliver the money.

“You do crazy things when you think your life is at stake,” says Ning, 32, sitting in one of his offices in a Nabis warehouse in the Bronx, New York.

In 2019, Ning and Lee’s fledging startup Nabis had just gone through Y Combinator, raising $5 million by promising to build the supply chain backbone of the emerging cannabis industry. Lee and Ning, using a Mercedes Metris and Lee’s Lexus he got from his in-laws as a wedding gift, would pick up product from pot growers and manufacturers in Humboldt and drop it off at dispensaries while driving south towards Los Angeles. Before going back upstate, they would stop at cultivators in Desert Hot Springs and Palm Springs to deliver their products to dispensaries in the Bay Area.

“It was really just two dudes with a truck and an SUV,” says Ning.

By their second year in business, Nabis had around 50 customers, employed 30 people and about $2 million in revenue.

Nabis is now the country’s biggest cannabis distributor, delivering $1.5 billion worth of weed products from more than 500 companies every year across California, Nevada and New York, generating $65 million in revenue. (The company is on track to surpass $100 million by the end of the year.) That means Nabis is delivering about 7% of the country’s wholesale cannabis products for the legal market. (California remains the company’s biggest state, where they distribute about 32% of the market’s products, 34% in Nevada and about 15% of New York’s, which they launched........

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