Rocco Del PrioreIn May 2015, Rocco Del Priore landed his dream job as a software engineer at Apple.
“And I actually hated it,” he says.
But it just so happened that the crashing reality of his dream job coincided with the first wave of adult-use cannabis, something he felt very passionate about, and Del Priore “decided to make a pretty steep left turn.”
His first cannabis tech startup, an ecommerce platform called Cultivate, didn’t gain enough traction, but it gave him insight into how cannabis software should work and, more importantly, that multiple products could be grouped into an all-in-one package. During that early venture, he also met “some like-minded people that also had this crazy way of looking at the world,” and together, they co-founded Sweed in 2018.
Sweed was built on the principle that marketing, ecommerce and point-of-sale should all be incorporated into a single product.
According to Del Priore, Sweed now has the largest development team in the industry and some of the largest multi-state operators in the country as clients. Over the past year, the company has hired a sales team (for the first time) and began offering its product to small- and medium-sized businesses.
“Originally, when we started this, we literally put names on the whiteboard in terms of who we wanted to see as our clients,” Del Priore says. “A lot of those names — I would say most of them at this point — are on the platform.”
Marijuana Venture’s 2026 40 under 40 feature was sponsored by MoonDust USA
MoonDust USA helps pre-roll brands and operators source custom cones, tubes, blunt wraps, and branded packaging with the consistency and speed needed to scale. As a women-owned direct manufacturer, MoonDust focuses on transparent pricing, dependable quality, and repeatable production, giving cannabis teams a supply partner they can count on as volumes grow.