BLAZE is cannabis software, not a cannabis product. It is the retail platform dispensaries run their business on: the point of sale at the counter, the online menu you browse before you walk in, the loyalty balance that follows you between visits. The company sells to licensed operators rather than to shoppers.
The core is a web-based, hardware-agnostic point of sale, launched in 2024, with cashless payments handled in house through BLAZEPAY. Around it sit a customer-facing display, self-serve kiosks, scan-to-shop, analytics and reporting, and an AI budtender. The e-commerce side adds online menus, a website builder and native mobile apps, all running off the same platform as the register.
Delivery gets its own tools: a driver app and a dispatch hub for routing orders. The marketing side, branded BLAZE Growth, combines multi-channel customer outreach, behavior-based loyalty programs and digital wallet passes. Those passes drop a dispensary's loyalty card into Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, update the balance after every purchase, and push promotions, flash deals and reminders, including proximity alerts when a customer is near the store.
It is built for every role in a store, not just the owner. Operators get real-time performance metrics. Inventory managers get tools that automate intake and simplify purchasing. Budtenders get quick recommendations and upsells at the counter, and the front desk gets a check-in flow. Shops moving over from another system are handed a migration team that runs the data import and a dedicated onboarding specialist.
BLAZE started with co-founder and CEO Chris Violas. A serious injury ended his run as a Division I collegiate soccer player, and cannabis came into his life during the recovery that followed. He started a delivery service on California's central coast and ran straight into the industry's software problem: the existing options were clunky and fragmented, and none of them made inventory, compliance and customer experience manageable at once.
He was working at Amazon Web Services at the time, and in 2015 he teamed up with his AWS colleague Manh Do, now the company's CTO. BLAZE was founded in 2017, raised a seed round in 2019 and closed a Series A in 2021. By 2020 the platform was running in more than 500 retail stores.
Two acquisitions widened the footprint. Greenline, bought in 2022, carried BLAZE into Canada. Tymber, bought in 2023, strengthened the e-commerce side. In 2024 the company launched BLAZEPAY as a payment facilitator and moved into regulated liquor and CBD retail in Canada. In 2025 it relaunched the suite as an AI-first retail platform.
The software is available to licensed cannabis operators in twenty states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia and Washington. Outside cannabis, BLAZE also serves vape, CBD and liquor retailers.
For a shopper, BLAZE stays invisible until it doesn't. When a dispensary's online menu matches the shelf, when the kiosk actually works, when your points are still there six weeks later, this is the layer doing that job. It is a business-to-business platform through and through. There is no BLAZE flower, no BLAZE cart, nothing to buy at the counter.