
He started with a $30,000 check and a narrow sales tool. Then customers pulled Distru into the far messier business of making cannabis inventory, orders, and compliance agree.

The Happy Cabbage founder left billion-dollar spreadsheets for dispensary back rooms. His current obsession is simple to state and difficult to solve: turn dusty inventory into cash without leaving customers empty-handed.

After his former company folded, John Manlove had no finished product and no time to mourn. He called the customers, opened a spreadsheet and began rebuilding wholesale cannabis from the awkward details up.
Born from the wreckage of an early cannabis marketplace, Apex Trading rebuilt the model around flat-rate software, direct buyer relationships and the gloriously unsexy work of keeping inventory, orders and compliance in sync.
Elevated Signals is a Vancouver-based software company building modern, cloud-based manufacturing operations software for highly regulated industries. Born out of the Canadian cannabis boom, its platform replaces paper, spreadsheets, and legacy ERPs with a single real-time source of truth across inventory, quality, traceability, planning, costing, manufacturing, and fulfillment. After raising a $7.9M CAD Series A led by Yaletown Partners in 2024, the company is expanding beyond cannabis into nutraceuticals, food and beverage, CPG, and critical minerals.