Founder & CEO of Nextleaf (CSE: OILS), Paul is an entrepreneur with more than 15 years of leadership experience with emerging growth companies. Paul Pedersen is responsible for the vision, culture, and strategic direction of Nextleaf.

Pedersen has been focused on the cannabis industry since 2013, and was an early investor and advisor to Canada’s first legal cannabis oil producer acquired in 2016 by The Cronos Group (TSE: CRON). Pedersen founded Nextleaf in 2016 to improve cannabis oil economics with the construction of its automated closed-loop extraction plant in Metro Vancouver. The Company is a low-cost producer of cannabis distillate and CBD oils through its wholly-owned subsidiary Nextleaf Labs, a Health Canada licensed cannabis processor. Nextleaf owns the 2nd largest patent & IP portfolio of any cannabis company.

Paul has been a lifelong serial entrepreneur. He founded his first company while a student in college, and led an exit through a reverse takeover in 2007 by Towerstream, a NASDAQ listed technology company. Paul has been a founder of five companies that have gone public through an IPO or reverse takeover. He has more than 10 years of experience as a board member of publicly traded companies. In 2018, Pedersen co-founded with his spouse, Bluenose Labs, the first cannabis processor and distributor on Cape Breton Island, at the former pharmaceutical manufacturing plant in North Sydney, Nova Scotia. Paul was named one of the Cannabis Industry’s Top Forty Under 40 in 2020. He has been a guest speaker at more than a dozen Universities and conferences related to cannabis.

Pedersen received a MBA in Finance from Michigan State University – where he served as a Fellow at the Center for Venture Capital Private Equity and Entrepreneurial Finance – and a Bachelors of Commerce Degree from the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University. Paul grew up in Langley, B.C. in a dairy farming family.