ABOUT
From healthcare to cannabis: building marketplace tech for stigmatized industries.
Sarah Griffis is the Chief Technology Officer at Weedmaps, the largest cannabis marketplace in the United States, where she leads the engineering and technology organization responsible for connecting consumers with brands and retailers across the legal cannabis industry. She joined in January 2025 with a mandate to modernize the platform and bring the same technology rigor she applied in healthcare to an industry that has historically operated at the margins of mainstream tech.
Before Weedmaps, Sarah built her career in healthcare technology — one of the most heavily regulated and underserved sectors in software. She was a founding team member and Head of Engineering at Kindbody, a women's health and fertility company. She then joined GoodRx as Director of Engineering, helping lead the company through its IPO in 2020. After GoodRx, she served as CTO at Cerebral, the tele-mental health platform, where she oversaw the technology stack serving patients across all 50 states.
Sarah holds a bachelor's degree in Environmental Science Engineering from Caltech and was named a Top 25 Women Leader in Consumer HealthTech in 2022. The common thread across her career, as she describes it, is stigmatized industries — sectors where public perception lags behind the reality of what technology can do for people. Healthcare was one. Cannabis is another.
At Weedmaps, Sarah is applying that same playbook: taking a marketplace that helped shape the legal cannabis industry over 15 years and building the technology infrastructure to match the scale and sophistication the market now demands. As consumers gain more choice in brands and products, Weedmaps' role as the centralized platform connecting them at the right time with the right product becomes increasingly critical — and increasingly complex to build well.
Read full transcript of interview
Sarah Griffis
One of the common threads in my career has been stigmatized industries.
Sarah Griffis
I am the CTO at Weed Maps, which is a cannabis company and a marketplace to connect consumers to brands and retailers.
Sarah Griffis
Before that, I was in marketplace technology and in highly regulated industries, most recently in healthcare.
Sarah Griffis
I was part of the founding team at Kindbody, a women's health and fertility company, and was part of engineering leadership at GoodRx, the largest provider of prescription discounts and coupons in the United States. And then I was the CTO at Cerebral, which provides tele-mental health across the country.
Sarah Griffis
Healthcare is not very tech-enabled or tech-savvy in a space that needed a lot of improvement in the conversation happening.
Sarah Griffis
Weed Maps has, for a large part, played a role in changing that conversation. So taking it from something that public opinion was very negative against it and almost overnight changed.
Sarah Griffis
So Weed Maps, the problems we are trying to solve are to connect consumers to the right brands and retailers. And we've seen a shift in the cannabis industry over the past 15 years since Weed Maps has operated,
Sarah Griffis
since folks now have much more choice in the brands and products that they're choosing. And we play a pivotal role in being that centralized marketplace to connect those folks at the appropriate times with the appropriate products.
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