Inside the Apex Trading partnership, the mechanics of ReadyPaid, and Stettner’s bet that the industry’s real bottleneck isn’t sales. It’s the money stuck in between.
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FundCanna’s Adam Stettner didn’t get curious about cannabis because of the plant. He got curious because of the math.
It was the early days of the pandemic. Almost every small business he knew was being told to lock the doors. Cannabis, federally illegal and officially considered to have no medical value, was getting waved through as essential.
“I didn’t understand how something could be federally illegal, and every business that I knew of was forced to close, and the one business that was deemed to have no medical value and be fully illicit in the eyes of the federal government was deemed essential,” Stettner told me.
That gap between the rulebook and reality bugged him enough that he spent a year reading, asking questions, and pulling on threads. By the time he was done, he had walked away from Reliant Funding, the small business lender he had built and run for fourteen years, and started FundCanna, now the biggest dedicated working-capital provider in the regulated cannabis space.
Five years in, the bet is paying off. The latest proof: a brand-new partnership with Apex Trading, one of the fastest-growing B2B marketplaces in the industry.
The Apex Deal: BNPL at a $150M-a-Month Marketplace
On June 11, FundCanna announced that its ReadyPaid Buy Now, Pay Later product is getting embedded right into Apex Trading. Apex serves more than 4,000 unique clients and pushes over $150 million in gross merchandise value through its platform every month. With the integration, sellers get paid the day the order goes through. Buyers can stretch the payment out at checkout.
The timing matters. According to Whitney Economics, the industry is sitting on close to $4 billion in delinquent accounts receivable. That figure is now operators’ top financial concern, ahead of taxes, regulation, and the price war.
Stettner put it plainly in the announcement: “Sellers in cannabis have effectively been acting as the bank for the supply chain. This partnership changes that dynamic. With ReadyPaid now embedded inside Apex, sellers get paid immediately and buyers gain the flexibility to pay over time as they generate revenue. When transactions are driven by demand without cash constraints, sales accelerate, order sizes grow and the entire marketplace becomes more efficient.”
He also flagged something I think gets buried in most coverage of cannabis lending: FundCanna’s clients have grown by an average of more than 50% after using its financial products. ReadyPaid, he said, takes that further by “turning every transaction into a growth opportunity instead of a cash flow constraint.”
Apex Trading founder and CEO John Manlove framed it from the marketplace side. “Our goal at Apex Trading has always been to make the cannabis supply chain more efficient and connected. By integrating FundCanna’s ReadyPaid, we’re giving buyers and sellers a seamless financial solution that helps them transact more confidently and grow without being constrained by short-term liquidity.”
There’s also a revenue share between the two companies, and Apex’s clients now get access to FundCanna’s automated prequalification flow, which gives operators near-instant visibility into how much capital they can actually tap.
A Liquidity Problem, Not a Demand Problem
The Apex deal makes more sense once you understand the diagnosis Stettner has been making for years.
“One of the biggest issues this industry faces is liquidity,” he said. “It’s not a demand issue. It’s a liquidity issue. The constraint that most operators see isn’t the ability to sell product. The demand is there. It’s money sitting frozen in inventory on their shelves, or it’s not having enough cash to pay for the next round.”
I asked him to put that into a real-world picture. He walked me through the chain reaction he sees in his book of more than 5,000 underwritten files.
A retailer can’t pay an A-tier brand on time. So they buy from a B-tier brand instead, one that’s willing to extend terms, even though the A-tier product is what their customers actually want. Suppliers offer net 30 because that’s what’s expected, and then watch those terms stretch to 60, 90, sometimes never. Cash gets locked up in product that turns too slowly. Margins get chewed up. Growth stops.
And almost none of it traces back to whether consumers want the product. They do.
What makes the bottleneck worse in cannabis is the missing credit infrastructure. Banks aren’t really an option. Credit cards aren’t really an option. “Unlike most industries, cannabis operators don’t have consistent access to traditional credit,” Stettner said. “That leaves billions of dollars tied up in receivables, squeezing sellers on liquidity and limiting how much buyers can actually purchase. That’s not a demand problem. It’s a liquidity problem.”
Not a Bank. Not Trying to Be.
One thing Stettner is careful about: he doesn’t want FundCanna lumped in with banks. Even though it partners with close to a hundred of them.
“FundCanna and banking, although we partner with nearly 100 banks, we’re not a bank, and we don’t operate like a bank. We’re not a deposit institution. What we are is a capital provider.”
The distinction matters. Even outside cannabis, banks only fund somewhere around 20 to 25% of the small businesses people assume are bankable. Stettner spent fourteen years at Reliant Funding filling that gap for non-cannabis SMBs. FundCanna runs the same play, but tuned for cannabis: flexible terms, customized products, renewable lines for operators who fall just outside what a bank can underwrite.
“Banks are great at what they do. But if it falls even right outside the line of what they do, they don’t do it well at all. They go from being great to being not good. My goal prior to getting into FundCanna and this industry was to fill the gap and do an excellent job at filling wherever banks fell off.”
Capital Plus Intelligence
Stettner’s bigger argument goes a step further. Money on its own, he says, isn’t actually that powerful. Money paired with data is.
“Access to capital plus intelligence, or data, not capital alone, is the most powerful combination that any business can have in any industry.”
That’s the idea behind daysonhand.com, a free benchmarking tool FundCanna built off its underwriting data. You give it four inputs. Annual sales. Cost of goods. Current product on shelves. How long you typically take to pay suppliers. In return you get a custom diagnostic that compares your operation against anonymized data from thousands of FundCanna’s actual files.
The output is detailed. The tool tells you whether you’re overstocked or understocked. How many days of inventory you’re sitting on. How fast it’s turning. How many days you’re funding out of pocket. What your estimated daily lost sales look like. The size of your inventory shortfall or excess in both wholesale and retail dollars. There’s even a what-if simulator that lets you model what happens if you tighten your inventory position.
“We’ve underwritten 5,000 files. Retail and vertically integrated operators combined equate to by far the largest segment of our base,” Stettner said. “If I aggregate and anonymize that information, I can determine, based on cash flow, profitability, repayment metrics, what the highest-performing benchmarks are.”
For retailers who don’t naturally think in days-on-hand terms, he reframes it. “It’s a great proxy for first benchmarking your business against other efficient operators, other profitable operators. But it’s also an excellent proxy for inventory management, and most importantly, cash flow management.”
How ReadyPaid Actually Works
ReadyPaid is the capital side of that combo. The mechanics are deliberately simple.
A retailer wants to order inventory. ReadyPaid pays the supplier on day zero. The supplier walks away with cash in hand, and the transaction is non-recourse. The AR risk on that order is gone for them.
The retailer gets the first 30 days for free. No payments, no cost of capital. Same window they’d expect from traditional net 30. From day 31 onward, they can pay in full or move into weekly installments, with up to six months to finish the payback. Cost of capital after that first 30 days runs 3% per 30-day period.
Stettner walked me through the math with a real example. A retailer with a 50% margin who uses ReadyPaid for 60 days nets 47% on the sale instead of 50%, but with zero cash out of pocket. Even in a worst-case scenario where it somehow took seven months to sell through, the retailer would still net 32%. “And that assumes it took seven months to sell their inventory, which never happens.”
On the supplier side, the cost of getting paid on day zero is 3 to 5% depending on volume. That’s where Stettner’s framing gets sharp. Industry AR breakage runs around 15%, with 5 to 8% never collected at all.
“If you’ve got breakage of 15, and delayed payment, and you’ve got accounting staff, and non-payment, and all of these things, then it’s inevitable that you’re paying more than 3 to 5%. Now you’ve got predictable, reliable, steady cash flow.”
MSO Traction and What’s Next
ReadyPaid launched at the end of Q3 last year. The repeat rate is currently 100%.
“We haven’t had a single client try it and not come back,” Stettner said.
That kind of stickiness is starting to open doors at the multi-state operator level, where the value proposition pushes past cash flow and into the quarterly reporting itself.
“We designed this with the idea that for MSOs, it would create predictable revenue for their quarterly reporting. It would remove this delinquent AR issue for them. And it would actually create a lot more loyalty and reduce attrition as buyers shop around. Because if you’re offering flexibility to pay over time and reliable terms, you’re a terrific partner.”
FundCanna is in the contract phase with one large MSO, with a Q3 go-live targeted. Two more MSO conversations are active. The Apex Trading integration on top of all of that should pour ReadyPaid in front of thousands of operators at the exact moment they’re trying to place an order.
For Stettner, who moved his life from New York City to San Diego to do this work, the pitch isn’t about disrupting anyone. It’s about straightening out an industry that grew up without the financial plumbing other industries take for granted. “When transactions are driven by demand without cash constraints, sales accelerate, order sizes grow and the entire marketplace becomes more efficient.”
There’s $4 billion in delinquent receivables saying the plumbing still needs work. The 100% repeat rate on ReadyPaid says somebody’s finally laying pipe.
ReadyPaid is available in all legal cannabis markets. More at ReadyPaid.com. Retailers who want to benchmark their own operation can use the free tool at daysonhand.com.
Sources: FundCanna and Apex Trading partnership announcement, June 11, 2026; Whitney Economics on cannabis delinquencies; CannabisTech interview with Adam Stettner.
