Business View Magazine | December 2018

108 109 it into over 500,000 square feet of thriving mar- ijuana grow capacity. Business View Magazine recently spoke to Rifici about his insights on the fast-evolving cannabis industry in Canada, and his company’s ambitious growth plans for the future. The following is an edited transcript of that con- versation. BVM: What inspired you to start Auxly and how has the company evolved? Rifici: “Auxly had its genesis after I left Cano- py Growth and was looking at how I wanted to create a vertically-integrated cannabis company. It began with cultivation and bringing together a team of individuals that would attack and miti- gate all the risk elements that go into building a cannabis company. Together with my founding partner, Hugo Alves, who also founded the most successful and largest cannabis legal and reg- ulatory practice at Bennett Jones, we pulled in people I had worked with at Tweed on the facility construction side, and people with expertise in building out cannabis facilities, or branding, or cultivation. That’s how the company launched. “We started as a streaming company to finance cultivators in exchange for Royalty in Product, a term that comes from the mining industry.We started off financing other operators to grow product for us.We had 13 partners across Cana- da in various stages of development and added an international operation in Uruguay with CBD derived from hemp production. Then, six months ago, Auxly evolved into upstream cultivation, and added midstream processing (R&D, product At Owens Wright we specialize in assisting U.S. cannabis companies with the legal aspects of raising capital and becoming publicly listed in Canada, as well as the structuring of commercial arrangements with Canadian cannabis companies. Paul De Luca, LL.M., ICD.D 416.848.4739 | pdeluca@owenswright.com Toronto | owenswright.com CLIENT-FOCUSED | RESULTS DRIVEN LET’S BEGIN AUXLY CANNABIS GROUP INC.