Partansky was not always in the cannabis space. He began his career as an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) where he worked on the MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) project, a device designed to produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere.
After a few years, he wanted to start his own company focused on robotics. Initially, he shifted his focus to developing a device called the Roca Sorter, a robotic card sorting system for Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon cards aimed at online and ecommerce sellers. He started this venture in 2018, but by the following year—after going full-time with his co-founders—they realized that the market for the Roca Sorter was small and that scaling to a $50 million or $100 million company would be challenging.
In pursuit of growth, they applied to Y Combinator, a prominent startup accelerator in Silicon Valley. This experience provided them with a pathway to transition into the cannabis industry. In 2020, almost after two years of working on the Roca Sorter, they pivoted to focus entirely on cannabis automation.
