“You do crazy things when you think your life is at stake,” says Ning, 32, sitting in one of his offices in a Nabis warehouse in the Bronx, New York.

In 2019, Ning and Lee’s fledging startup Nabis had just gone through Y Combinator, raising $5 million by promising to build the supply chain backbone of the emerging cannabis industry. Lee and Ning, using a Mercedes Metris and Lee’s Lexus he got from his in-laws as a wedding gift, would pick up product from pot growers and manufacturers in Humboldt and drop it off at dispensaries while driving south towards Los Angeles. Before going back upstate, they would stop at cultivators in Desert Hot Springs and Palm Springs to deliver their products to dispensaries in the Bay Area.

“It was really just two dudes with a truck and an SUV,” says Ning.

By their second year in business, Nabis had around 50 customers, employed 30 people and about $2 million in revenue.

Nabis is now the country’s biggest cannabis distributor, delivering $1.5 billion worth of weed products from more than 500 companies every year across California, Nevada and New York, generating $65 million in revenue. (The company is on track to surpass $100 million by the end of the year.) That means Nabis is delivering about 7% of the country’s wholesale cannabis products for the legal market. (California remains the company’s biggest state, where they distribute about 32% of the market’s products, 34% in Nevada and about 15% of New York’s, which they launched in 2024.) This April, Nabis expanded to New Jersey by acquiring a license held by the distribution arm of Hudson News, the airport market chain.

“That’s how it started,” says Ning while surveying the Bronx warehouse, one of seven across three states, filled with about $1.5 million worth of cannabis vapes, pre-rolls, flower, gummies, beverages and balms. “Now, we’re a shiny tech platform. Nabis is like the Amazon of cannabis.”

Nabis is nowhere close to being Amazon but today, but its warehouses are packed with about $200 million worth of products in any given month, and with a fleet of 155 trucks, its underlying technology is what makes it more like Amazon Prime than a typical shipping firm. The Nabis Marketplace allows brands and dispensaries to sell directly to one another, with the company acting as the middleman, delivering orders, insuring compliance with state law, and collecting and paying taxes. For this, Nabis takes a 7% to 18% cut of the value of the transaction. Brands and retailers also pay several hundred dollars a month to access the company’s software, which includes data and analytics about what types of products are selling the best and how long others stay on the shelf. Nabis also offers inventory storage.

“Our goal is to be able to be a prediction engine, an infrastructure platform that essentially effectuates this perfectly clearing market where exactly what is produced is exactly what is sold into the market at exactly the right time,” Ning tells Forbes.

The pair also launched Nabis Capital, the company’s short-term financing division, which buys invoices from brands that do not want to wait the typical 30 days for dispensaries to pay for products. Nabis will buy an invoice and pay a brand for an average 4% discount on the value of an order for a good credit-worthy retailer. (It has been as high as 50% when those invoices need to be collected from struggling retailers.) While such an arrangement might sound predatory, it’s not in the cannabis industry where accounts receivable can be the most difficult aspect for brands, who have been largely cut off from the mainstream banking system due to cannabis being considered a Schedule I drug, akin to heroin. Dispensaries are known to pay very late, and some have been known to not pay for inventory at all, especially for smaller brands. Nabis has its own credit score rating of retailers that brands can access, which helps them decide whether to sell to a specific dispensary.

Without Nabis, a retailer could be stuck without any product if it has a reputation for not paying its invoices, which is why its default rate over the last five years is less than 0.5%. “We do hold a lot of bargaining power,” Ning says, “when it comes to collecting payments, given our size and scale.”

All of this is why Nabis has attracted $50 million in venture capital at a $150 million valuation, a pittance for any other industry but a relative war chest for capital-constrained cannabis startups. Its investors include NFL Hall of Famer Joe Montana, DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang, along with respected cannabis investors such Costa Rica-based Artemis Growth Partners. The company has been profitable for almost two years and has not needed to raise money since 2021.

“Ultimately Nabis is creating the infrastructure for the space so as the industry grows, it doesn’t break,” says Ning.

Lee and Ning are not legacy marijuana entrepreneurs. Instead, they are your typical over-educated tech-minded, Silicon Valley types. They met in an accelerated math class at Langley High School in Virginia as the only freshman and became fast friends.

“We always thought about little entrepreneurial things to do together but never pulled the trigger on it until a decade later after high school and we were both in San Francisco,” says Ning.

After graduating from Harvard, Lee interned at Google, then worked as an engineer at Meta. Ning went to the University of Virginia and got an engineering job at Microsoft before founding Scaffold, a developer software tool. He brought the startup through the elite Y Combinator process. He sold Scaffold to Amazon for several million dollars, and in 2017, he and Lee decided to start a company in the cannabis industry. It was a year before California would legalize recreational marijuana, and ten years after it had legalized medical. One of their friends started a pre-roll brand in Humboldt but needed help getting his products down state to dispensaries. During those early days, distributors were just guys with cars, and a Rolodex of cultivators in California’s Emerald Triangle. Ning and Lee thought there was an opportunity to become the industry’s FedEx. They launched Nabis (shortened from cannabis) and used Ning’s earnings from Scaffold to seed the company. They started driving routes themselves and if they had a third delivery, they would call an Uber and have the driver drop it off at a dispensary. Ning’s apartment in San Francisco’s Jackson Square was their “warehouse.” All of which would be breaking state laws and regulations today.

“Back then, when California legalized recreational they didn’t have a legal framework for the right way to do things,” says Ning.

After going through Y Combinator for Nabis, they leased a few warehouses in the northern and southern parts of the state and started getting more customers. By 2020, Nabis was generating around $10 million in revenue. In 2022, when New York legalized recreational marijuana, Ning rented an apartment and started laying the groundwork to expand to the Empire State. While California is the country’s biggest market with $6 billion in legal sales, New York is expected to grow into just as big a market. New York had a tumultuous rollout—too few legal stores and a wild west of unlicensed and illegal ones—but Nabis started small, launching in 2023 with a $250,000 investment, and started distributing products in 2024. Eventually, the bet started to pay off. In 2025, New York only had 30 licensed dispensaries. Now it has 600.

“New York, being the new growth engine, is growing like 100%, 200% a year,” says Ning. “Last year we grew 600% in this state alone.”

One of Nabis’ biggest customers is Graham Farrar, the president and cofounder of California-based Glass House Brands, which is home to the biggest marijuana cultivation facility in the U.S. Farrar says the company has expertly weathered the storms of California’s chaotic and ultra-competitive market. Glass House, which sold 643,000 pounds of cannabis last year and is forecasting 1 million pounds of weed by the end of 2026, cycled through four different distributors over a decade, all of which went out of business, before signing up with Nabis.

“They have great operations, invested in their tech stack, [possess] a world of regulatory knowledge, and they are focused,” says Farrar. “They’ve built nice infrastructure to stay in business and remain competitive while others could not survive.”

Inside the Bronx warehouse, Ning is standing under towering shelves filled with cannabis products. A faint skunky smell wafts through the air as Dr. Dre’s “Nothing but a ‘G’ Thang” plays. A dozen workers sort boxes for the next delivery to dispensaries across the five boroughs, Long Island, the Hudson Valley and all the way up to Albany.

Ning and Lee say their “default” exit plan right now is to go public, but that will require more laws to change. In April, the Trump Administration reclassified medical marijuana to Schedule III, a category of less dangerous drugs, down from Schedule I. Only about 10% of Nabis’ business is medical with the rest being recreational marijuana. Nabis is in the process of applying for a DEA license under the medical regulations. In June, the Justice Department will hold a hearing about whether recreational marijuana should be re-classified as a Schedule III drug as well. That kind of rescheduling could transform Nabis’ business. Currently, legal marijuana cannot be shipped across state lines. But with all the progress at the federal level, Ning and Lee are optimistic that will change, too.

“Hopefully, with interstate commerce it allows us to have regional dominance,” says Ning. “We’re making a bet that cannabis will legalize eventually. And so regardless of the timing, our goal is to build this over the patchwork of regulations across the nation.”

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