As more states voted to legalize some form of marijuana last year, pot sales have gone through the roof. An ArcView market research pegs 2016 sales for legal weed at $6.9 billion, a whopping 34% jump over the previous year.
And that’s where investors smell an opportunity. While it is still difficult to invest directly in legal pot through public equities, venture capital firms and private equity funds have raised hundreds of millions of investment dollars.