As revealed in the Financial Times, our portfolio company GROW Group PLC (GROW®) has announced that it is planning an IPO in the UK or USA in 2025.

GROW^®, which has raised more than £12m since it was founded in 2017, is focused on enabling global access to quality cannabis medicines for the benefit of patients who need them for treating major conditions (such as epilepsy, arthritis, MS, PTSD, anxiety and endometriosis).

It exclusively distributes medical cannabis products for top tier manufacturers, as well as having its own in-house product which is protected by a suite of patents. These are prescribed by healthcare professionals as an alternative to potentially harmful opioids, with the medical and therapeutic qualities now being widely recognised.

Already one of Europe’s leading medical cannabis companies, GROW^® seeks to be the world's number one supplier of medical cannabis by patient numbers by 2025.

The company is led by Co-Founder and CEO Ben Langley, a former JPMorgan banker who is regarded as the UK’s first professional cannabis investor, and Co-Founder and CSO Ian Atkinson, a geneticist and botanist with a PhD in Plant Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. They have a wealth of strong leaders with pharmaceutical and commercial expertise working alongside them, including the CEO of GROW^® Pharma, Pierre Van Weperen, who was previously a director at Pfizer.

We have raised just under £1m for the company including our initial investment in late 2022, which has assisted with scaling-up existing UK operations and accelerating its international expansion.

GROW^® has continued to grow rapidly in its core distribution markets in the UK and Germany, and has also achieved the major milestone of entering Australia which has one of the largest and fastest-growing medical cannabis markets.

The UK, Germany and Australia are the three most exciting markets in the world at this point so having a strong presence in each is hugely important strategically as the company seeks to cement its position as a globally leading medical cannabis company.

In the new Financial Times piece about European cannabis businesses planning to go public, GROW^® CEO Ben Langley shared the company’s strategic vision.

He says it would potentially choose Nasdaq as it is aiming to benefit from a US proposal to reclassify cannabis. The GROW^® board believes that the market is showing signs of improvement, with NASDAQ up >50% over last 18 months, and the company is therefore planning an IPO in either the US or UK next year.

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