Will Kleidon
Age: 27
Position: Founder and CEO
Company: Ojai Energetics
Location: Los Angeles, California
Ojai Energetics has a patent pending on the process of “making little water bubbles filled with CBD,” CEO Will Kleidon says. The company’s water-soluble delivery system lets consumers feel the effects of CBD and other cannabinoids almost immediately.
Kleidon says there are some major beverage companies that are currently doing research and development to include Ojai in their beverages.
“We’ve had to scale up on production on the water-soluble end and we can now produce up to 30,000 gallons a week if needed,” he adds.
Since starting beta tests on its hemp-based tinctures and other products that are infused with water-soluble CBD demand has grown by several thousand percent, according to Kleidon. It’s fast growth, even for a company with former NASCAR driver Stanton Barrett as its president.
“We started exploding last year through word of mouth and I basically pulled the product back so we could scale for bigger distribution,” he says. “We will be in brick and mortar (stores) all over the U.S. this year.”
Coming from Silicon Valley, it should be no surprise that Kleidon built Ojai to operate in a similar fashion to a tech company.
“We are really set up to be more like the Intel Inside of cannabis delivery systems,” he says. “I built the whole intellectual property catalog for a whole bunch of uses, not just for the water-soluble element. The water-soluble element is for all cannabinoids, not just for CBD from hemp. We can actually license out our tech.”