The 38-year-old entrepreneur started Namaste Technologies from his garage "selling a few vaporisers a day" and he now describes the online marketplace as a "one stop shop" for anything cannabis. Namaste Technologies operates in 20 countries and is listed in Canada with a market capitalisation which has gone as high as $1 billion but Dollinger's ambitions are even larger. "Netflix and Amazon are some of the leading AI [artificial intelligence] machine learning websites in the world," he says. "When you visit their websites you see something completely different to what I see. That's essentially what we are implementing into our website." A 'green wave' is driving demand for cannabis. Credit:Rohan Thomson Dollinger says the Namaste Technologies website will suggest related products to users based on their purchasing and browsing history.

"I’m not saying I’m [Jeff] Bezos or [Richard] Branson or a [Elon] Musk yet, but I am hopefully one day going to have a company as large as theirs if not bigger," he says. Dollinger is enthusiastic about the growth opportunities in Australia with the federal government legalising patient access to Australian-grown and manufactured medicinal cannabis in 2016, while states and territories have their own legislation controlling its prescription and use. "Each country has different rules and perspectives," he says. "Australia obviously limits the scope of what we use medical cannabis for but when you look at Canada, that is where Canada was a bunch of years ago. Canada has done a wonderful job of rolling out the product from a medical to a recreational product." Dollinger wants countries including Australia to use Canada as a framework. "Hopefully three to five years from now we will start to see wider uses of cannabis in Australia and we will hopefully evolve our platform as the rules and regulations change," he says.

In the meantime Dollinger says the main challenge to Namaste Technologies' continued growth is dealing with different jurisdictions and legislation. "In Australia we need to be extremely careful and always abide by the rules," he says. Export market While Namaste Technologies sees medicinal cannabis as opening up the Australian market for cannabis related products, Australian businesses are looking to medical grade cannabis as an export crop. ASX-listed Australian cannabis producers stocks soared last year when the federal government approved therapeutic marijuana products for export.

Independently owned medicinal cannabis focused company, Australian Natural Therapeutics Group (ANTG), is one of a handful of Australian companies which have received a federal licence allowing them to cultivate and harvest cannabis for medicinal purposes. Matt Cantelo, chief executive at ANTG. Matt Cantelo, chief executive and co-founder of ANTG, says the business has signed an agreement with European giant Cannamedical Pharma to export Australian grown cannabis for German patients. "Australian growing conditions from plant composition perspective are the most ideal in the world," he says. "The Australian sun puts the plants under positive distress and produces a fairly potent product." Cantelo says ANTG has invested "multi million dollars" in its growing facilities.

"We are investing heavily in the early stages in capital at the moment," he says. He hopes that medical cannabis will be more frequently prescribed in Australia at the moment with authorities granting 2500 approvals for legal use of the medicine in the past year. "The medical profession really needs to be educated further than it is now," he says. "Australian doctors are quite conservative and do want to see this on home soil as well. We are at the very start of what will be one of the most booming industries in the world." The Australian Medical Association supports clinical trials of medical cannabis to establish clinical guidelines before wider promulgation throughout the community. In the meantime, ANTG's product has found a ready market in Germany with Cannamedical Pharma sold out of medical cannabis for the next 90 days.

"Our biggest limitation is that we have too little supply coming to the German market," says David Henn, chief executive of Cannamedical Pharma. Follow MySmallBusiness on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.