CANNAINVESTOR Magazine U.S. Privately Held February 2019 | Page 28

The Canadian cannabis industry is ripe with targets for mergers and acquisitions. For Rob Fia, CEO of Icon Exploration (TSX-V- IEX), which is completing a reverse takeover of private company City View Green (CVG), the idea of building a state-of-the art cannabis company from the ground up offered a better value proposition. In just over 12 months, the company has made significant strides to develop a solid business footing while applying for its Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations (ACMPR) licence, and plans to go public soon.

With almost 20 years in finance and investment banking, Rob Fia developed a knack for finding companies that were great investment candidates, identifying missing pieces, seeding them with cash, fixing what needed to be fixed and taking them public. But as CEO of mining and exploration company Icon Exploration, his attention continued to turn to the promise of the emerging Canadian cannabis industry.

“I was approached by plenty of cannabis startups looking for investors,” he says. “But they were lacking the fundamentals I was looking for. I finally decided that it made much more sense to build a company from the ground up that incorporated all of the fundamentals that the others were lacking.”

Learning from earlier players in the cannabis sector, Fia set out to secure a state-of-the-art growing facility, while assembling an experienced management and operational team that could deliver on the business plan.

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