Niccolo Aieta

As a chemical engineer, it’s no wonder that Spherex founder and Chief Technology Officer Niccolo Aieta sees his role in the cannabis industry in the simplest terms, even if the products he makes are complicated scientific wonders.

“We’re just trying to make the molecules that we are making more accessible to the people who are consuming them,” he says. “At the end of the day, we’re solving problems.”

Spherex’s high-quality distillate products like dablicators, vape cartridges, Pax pods and Phyx cannabis-infused beverages can today be found in 300 stores in its home state of Colorado, as well as 250 stores in Oklahoma and four provinces in Canada.

Aieta is a Southern California native who graduated from Sonoma State University just after the passage of Prop 215 and then got his doctorate from the Colorado School of Mines researching hydrogen fuel cell technology. He initially planned to use his knowledge of supercritical CO2 extraction to make that part of the cannabis industry more efficient and scalable. In 2015, he founded Spherex with the plan to do toll processing — or “chemical upgrading,” in his words — changing biomass into oil for cannabis companies.

But he soon realized that in order to make it in this business, his company was going to have to make “compelling products for the general public.”

Still a scientist, Aieta says he is “innovating every day” and loves the new problems the industry constantly brings him to solve.

“If you’re not ready to pivot, you’ll get swallowed up,” he says.