For February’s Startup Happy Hour, StartupSac and the Carlsen Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Sac welcomed Jontae James, CEO of NatureTrak as our guest entrepreneur.
NatureTrak is an enterprise level track and trace platform in the cannabis space that provides transparency for financial institutions by tracking from seed to sale. It’s a risk management platform that provides fraud detection, insights on what mistakes are made in the system, what happens in the system, and gives insights to the banks with an audit trail so the banks can bank the industry.
Carlsen Center Executive Director Cameron Law kicked off the evening with an interview with Jontae to learn about Jontae’s background, the origin story of NatureTrak including their pivots along the way. Following the initial interview, we opened up a Q&A session with the audience to ask their startup questions and get answers from Jontae. Check out the full interview and Q&A in the video below.
About Jontae James, CEO of NatureTrak
Jontae James is the founder of NatureTrak, an enterprise risk management platform for financial institutions that bank the cannabis industry. He has consulted with government agencies to build track and trace solutions creating proprietary algorithms to uncover unusual or suspicious activity in the supply chain. Jontae has over 15 years in government and enterprise SaaS supply chain management. Prior to NatureTrak, he was co-founder of Bluntli, a digital licensing platform in the cannabis industry which specialized in patient and entity license verification back. This was the first of several track and trace technologies to bring transparency and visibility into the emerging cannabis market. Jontae has led a boutique venture capital organization’s sales and marketing for early-stage startups. He is passionate about entrepreneurship and launched a consumer-driven mobile app created to promote a more active, connected and productive employees called Your Out Of Office (YOOO!). Along with a community building solution aimed towards entertainment industry and media agencies to develop business partners to align resources with social media platforms – celebrity campaigns, political media campaign, news releases, events and promotions. He holds a BA from University of St. Francis in business management.
