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Human-curated intelligence for your cannabis business.
We built Decide, the most complete connected picture of this industry that exists, and we use every modern tool — AI included — wherever it earns its place. We are not sentimental about technology.
What the tools don’t do is decide what’s worth tracking, how a market should be defined, or which question you’re really asking underneath the one you asked.
Arnau Valdovinos
Founder & principal analyst
Barcelona · since 2018
Cited by national press in Spain, the UK and Germany
What we do
Four things people come to us for
Strategic, high-level and downstream: operations, supply chain, marketing and sales. Open any one for the detail.
Market
Make operational decisions with confidence
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Where is the volume actually going, at what price, and who is taking it? We size the market from customs records, dispensing data and company accounts — then show you the denominator behind every figure so your board can interrogate it.
- Market sizing and forecasting
- Competitive analysis
- Operations and supply-chain mapping
Strategy
See where the market is going before your competitors do
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Entry sequencing, pricing corridors, partner shortlists and the case you put in front of an investment committee. We have watched this industry make the same mistakes twice, which is the most useful thing we can bring to a plan.
- Commercial strategy
- Corporate development
- Business plan and capital-raise support
Data
Ground every decision in what is actually happening
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When the answer is not published anywhere, we build the dataset: surveys, structured interviews, freedom-of-information requests, retailer fieldwork, and parsing public records nobody has cleaned. It is the half of the job most firms skip.
- Ad hoc primary research
- Product, price, buyer and supplier databases
- Surveys and social listening
Regulation
Read the upside and the downside ahead of the curve
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What a decree will actually do to a P&L, which licence class you need, where the bottleneck sits between legal-on-paper and available-in-pharmacy — and how long the gap has taken to close in comparable markets.
- Feasibility assessments
- Go-to-market blueprints
- Policy and regulatory analysis
We don’t work directly on scientific affairs, quality and compliance, or agronomy and production engagements.
How we work
We are a data company that gives advice, not an advisory that quotes data
Almost every firm in this sector reads the news and forms a view. We start one layer down: we build and own the underlying dataset, and the advice is what falls out of it. Four things follow.
01
A strict source hierarchy
Regulator filings, customs records, dispensing data and company accounts at the top. Industry surveys and trade estimates below. Press reporting is a lead, not a source. When two sources disagree we show you the disagreement and say which we’d trust.
02
Primary research when the answer doesn’t exist
Surveys, structured interviews, freedom-of-information requests, retailer fieldwork, and the patient work of parsing records nobody has cleaned. It is how the UK market became measurable at all.
03
Structure that holds across borders and years
One cannabis-specific taxonomy across 120 markets, maintained over time — so a figure from Poland in 2024 means the same thing as one from Australia in 2026.
04
AI where it earns its place
It runs right through our pipeline: ingestion, classification, translation, first-pass extraction. We would be worse at this without it, and anyone claiming otherwise is either behind or bluffing.
A model can work inside a frame like that at enormous speed. It cannot build the frame, and it cannot tell you when the frame is wrong.
Who we work with
Five kinds of organisation, five very different questions
Foundations before the raise
You have a licence application, a thesis and a deck. What you don’t have is a defensible number. We size the opportunity properly, find the value proposition that survives contact with the market, and assemble the research a serious investor will ask for — before you go out.
- Market sizing that stands up in diligence
- Competitive positioning
- Business plan and capital-raise support
Growing revenue on evidence
You are already licensed and selling. The question is which channel, which product, which country next — and what the numbers say rather than what the trade press says.
- Commercial and pricing strategy
- Supply-chain and operations mapping
- Buyer and supplier databases
Somaí Pharmaceuticals
Finding the buyers for bulk extracts and APIs
Somái operates at scale near Lisbon, making bulk extracts, APIs and finished products for international medical markets. The question was who, specifically, to sell to. We built a qualified lead directory across API companies and CDMOs — several hundred potential partners, segmented by location, need and activity, and ranked by priority, with an outreach strategy for reaching them.
Walking in with your eyes open
You run a real business in another industry and cannabis is the adjacency. You need to know the competitive position you are walking into, what determines success here, and which of the received wisdom is wrong.
- Feasibility and market entry
- Import requirements by market
- Competitor and partner directories
Pax Labs
Where a global brand actually sits on European shelves
Pax makes vaporisation devices sold worldwide, and wanted to know how far they had genuinely penetrated European retail — pharmacy, CBD shops, vape shops — across six key markets. There was no dataset for this, so we built one: a European retailer database assembled from CRM records, web-scraping and manual primary research, set against a competitive landscape drawn from the same sources. What came out was a growth roadmap, market by market.
Diligence that survives the IC
You are pricing an operator, a market or a whole thesis. We give you the independent read — including the parts management would rather you didn’t model.
- Market and operator diligence
- M&A and funding context
- Independent validation of management forecasts
An independent read for a state body
Ministries, regulators and trade agencies need numbers they can defend in public, produced by someone with no position in the outcome.
- Export and trade intelligence
- Policy and regulatory analysis
- Market monitoring and benchmarking
Uruguay XXI
Export intelligence for a national industry
Uruguay legalised before anyone else and built real production capacity early. The harder question was where any of it could actually go: which import markets were open, on what terms, to whom, and at what price. We provided export intelligence on international markets for Uruguayan operators — mapping destination markets, their import requirements and the commercial realities behind them. The beneficiary wasn’t one company. It was a national industry.
Arnau Valdovinos
Career
Education
Political Science, UAB · MA Public Opinion Management, Universitat de València · Postgraduate Data Analytics, UOC
I got into cannabis market data because there were almost no reliable numbers behind the big claims. As a young data professional, that looked like a large opportunity.
Ten years in market research taught me what proper data and analytics look like — and how far they can shape operational decisions, strategy and social outcomes.
When I entered the sector in 2018 there was no good data available. Market-sizing claims were enormous and contradictory, “trust me, bro” was the standard of evidence for a trend, and insights had to be scraped from the first-hand experience of operators.
Worse, companies were making expensive decisions on the back of badly defined data. Things have improved since, but there is still a long way to go before emerging cannabinoid markets get the level of data that pharmaceutical and CPG businesses take for granted.
That is Cannamonitor’s vision, and what we work towards every day. Proper data lets operators make the right call ahead of everyone else, and it is a big determinant of who succeeds. A market that cannot be measured does not attract investment, and a regulator without visibility legislates cautiously, or not at all.
Every market we size properly is one that can be argued about honestly — and industry, patients and consumers stand to gain the most. Cannabis has spent long enough being argued about dishonestly; shortcuts only compound the stigma.
There is a lot worth getting right: cannabinoids in medicine, hemp in food and materials, an industry that employs people and strengthens the economy. None of it happens on numbers nobody trusts — so our commitment is to sound methodology and the highest level of integrity.
— Arnau Valdovinos, Barcelona
Stage & podcast
FarmaforumICBCScience in the CityCannabis HubCannabis Data Science
The Cannabis Review
Respect My Region
Green Queens
2018
The first market-entry mandates into Europe, the year Germany opened
2019
Led the research behind Europe’s first cannabis intelligence platform
Proof
Where the work ends up, and what people say about it
Reported by national press in Spain, the UK and Germany, and across the European and Latin American trade press, continuously since 2024.
Público
El Nacional
The Objective
Merca2
CannaReporterKrautinvestMMJ DailyICBCCáñamoCannabis Magazine
leafieCannabis Law Report
GrowerIQ
born2invest
El Planteo
Soft Secrets
PharmaTech
Farmaindustrial
Interempresas
HortiDaily
Agropharm
Infoestancos
“The report is amazing. Congratulations for being the most loved and hated person in cannabis at the same time.”
Alessandro RossoniCo-founder & CEO, Nimbus Health“It is the best report on the market. The depth, the concise insights, the data visualisation — all of it makes it number one.”
Yerbol KuljanovBD Director, Essence Investment“Cannamonitor is the best source of international cannabis activity out there.”
Ruth Fisher, PhDCo-founder, CannDynamics“This report adds great value to the sector. Many thanks for your dedication and analysis.”
Telmo GüellCEO, The Beemine Lab“The professionalism in the approach was second only to the quality of commercial leads we generated as a result.”
Callum KellasCommercial Intelligence Study“Excellent work. The information provided in the report is of enormous value.”
Joao DuartteBusiness Development, Decimal EngineeredProducts
Or take the data directly
Not everything needs a project. Four levels, from a free monthly brief to a bespoke programme.
Collaborate
Four ways to work together
Commissioned research
A study built around your question — sizing, entry, competitive landscape, pricing, supply chain. Including primary research where the data doesn’t exist yet.
Report · underlying data · a walkthrough session
Start a research briefAdvisory & retainer
Ongoing analyst access for a board, an investment committee or a strategy team that needs someone to ask.
Monthly · rolling
Request an advisory callData licensing & API
Our datasets inside your own systems, reports or product. Multi-seat, API, bespoke taxonomies, white-label.
Annual licence
Talk about licensingCollaboration, media & speaking
Co-authored research, data partnerships, panels, webinars, and expert comment when you’re on deadline.
Tell us what you have in mind
Get in touchStart a conversation
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What happens next
- An analyst reads everything that comes in.
- You hear back within two business days — including on the ones we can’t help with, because a quick no is more useful than silence.
- If it’s a fit, we book thirty minutes.
Barcelona
Our office is at C/ de Pau Claris 167, 08037 Barcelona. We’re on Central European Time and work across European, North American and Australian hours.