Vince C Ning

Co-Founder and CEO Nabis

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Vince Ning is the co-founder and chief executive of Nabis, the largest licensed cannabis wholesale platform in California and now an operator in New York and Nevada as well. The business exists because of a regulatory quirk: California licenses distribution separately from cultivation and retail, and every legal gram must pass through a licensed distributor with compliance, testing, tax remittance and track-and-trace obligations attached. Most brands cannot afford to build that themselves. Nabis provides it as a platform, combining warehousing and delivery with the software, financial services and analytics that sit on top, so that a brand can reach shelves without operating a fleet. Ning and his co-founder Jun S. Lee started it in 2018 by driving the deliveries themselves. It now carries more than 400 brands and reaches 99% of licensed retailers in the three states where it operates, filling over 3,500 wholesale orders a week.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Nabis in 2018 with Jun S. Lee and leads it as chief executive.
• Grew the platform to more than 400 cannabis brands and coverage of 99% of licensed retailers across California, New York and Nevada, with over 3,500 wholesale orders fulfilled weekly.
• Began the business at ground level, with both founders working as delivery drivers moving product to dispensaries.
• Founded Scaphold, a software company that was acquired by Amazon; he has said he sold the startup at 23.
• Began his career as a software engineer at Microsoft.
• Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and to Marijuana Venture’s 40 Under 40.
• Served as a board director of the Cannabis Distribution Association, the industry body for licensed distributors.
• Led Nabis onto the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies and recruited Sean Arroyo as president as the company scaled.

Professional Journey

Ning trained as a computer scientist at the University of Virginia, where he studied computer science alongside economics and statistics, and later spent time at the Harvard Kennedy School on public policy and leadership - an unusual pairing that turned out to be directly applicable to an industry defined by regulation. He started his career as an engineer at Microsoft and then founded Scaphold, a developer-tooling software company. Amazon acquired it, and by his own account he had sold the business by the age of 23.

Nabis followed in 2018, and the shift from developer tools to cannabis logistics is less abrupt than it looks. California’s regulated market had just opened, and its structure separated distribution into its own licensed layer with heavy compliance obligations - metrc track-and-trace reporting, lab testing coordination, excise tax collection, and physical chain of custody. For brands, that layer was a barrier; for someone who thinks in platforms, it was infrastructure waiting to be built once and sold many times. Ning and Jun S. Lee, an engineer who had worked at Facebook and founded the AI company Allganize, started by doing the work manually, driving product to dispensaries themselves, which is the kind of beginning that tends to produce software that matches how the job is actually done.

What they built is best understood as three businesses stacked together. Underneath is physical distribution: licensed warehousing, fleet and delivery to retailers. On top of that sits the software that brands and buyers actually touch, a wholesale marketplace with ordering, inventory visibility and sales data. Layered over both are financial services, which matter disproportionately in an industry where federal illegality keeps conventional banking and credit largely out of reach, and where payment terms between brand and retailer are a chronic source of failure.

That combination produced rapid concentration. Nabis became the largest licensed wholesale platform in California, reaching essentially every licensed retailer in the state, and then extended the model into New York and Nevada as those markets opened. The company now lists more than 400 partner brands and 99% retailer coverage across its three states, and appeared on the Inc. 5000 ranking of fastest-growing private companies. As it scaled, the leadership structure changed with it: the company brought in Sean Arroyo as president and built out a conventional executive bench with a CFO, chief people officer and general counsel, with Ning listed on the company’s current leadership page as CEO and co-founder. Alongside the operating role he has been active in the industry’s policy and trade side, serving as a board director of the Cannabis Distribution Association, and has been recognised on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and in Marijuana Venture’s 40 Under 40.

Education

University of Virginia

Bachelor’s degree, Computer Science, Economics and Statistics

Harvard Kennedy School

Public policy and leadership

Both entries come from interview coverage rather than institutional records, and no dates or degree designations were found.