Amanda Ostrowitz
Company: Regs Technology
Title: CEO
Age: 33
With every state doing things differently, and every county and municipality in many of those states empowered to write their own rules, navigating the regulations in the cannabis space can get pretty chaotic. Michigan, for example, has 1,700 local governments, all with their own rules.
But in that chaos, Amanda Ostrowitz, CEO of Regs Technology, maker of the CannaRegs platform, saw opportunity and launched her company in May 2015.
“If it wasn’t chaotic, I wouldn’t have a company,” she says.
Based in Denver, but currently available in 14 states, CannaRegs is a data and research platform that tracks the laws — and changes in the laws — at every level, from federal and state to county and municipal. Through a combination of algorithms and human oversight from the company’s 24 employees, CannaRegs not only covers every change, but every potential change.
“We track every single time a government talks,” Ostrowitz says. From planning to hearings to passage to rewrites, every move is cataloged by CannRegs. “We track all of that info and we make it super searchable in a way that people can find what they need in a matter of clicks as opposed to hours of research.”
Prior to starting Regs Technology, Ostrowitz was a “frustrated attorney” working in banking and regulation. But she always thought that researching laws on the internet should be more like shopping for shoes, with the ability to filter down through the metatags to narrow a search. With that in mind, she was tasked to do some cannabis research and realized how disparate the information really was.
She enjoys the fast pace and ever-changing nature of the industry and loves being part of something new. It is “so much more fun” and impactful than her previous career, she says.
“I was part of a huge slew of new regulation and change (in the banking space), but the change in this space, the magnitude is so much greater,” she says.