In Frankfurt, Germany, in September 2020, in a small two-room doctor practice, telemedicine company Bloomwell had its first patient meet with a doctor to get a prescription for marijuana. It would still be another four years until Germany would legalize pot for medical and recreational use—and the process was arduous.

Still classified as a narcotic at the time, cannabis prescriptions had to be written on paper and delivered to a pharmacist, which had to store the product in a safe due to its classification as a dangerous drug. Bloomwell then had a team of about 25 couriers in place to pick up a script for overnight delivery to a pharmacy. Once a pharmacy filled the order, it was sent via a secured courier. Within a week, the company’s first patient received their cannabis.

“Back then, when we launched it, it was just a website and people didn’t believe it was real,” says Bloomwell cofounder Julian Wichmann, 40, who is also a board-certifed radiologist. “The patient demand was there immediately. Once we launched, we had patients. We were overrun within the first four weeks.”

During the first few months of operation, Bloomwell had 200 patients a month—some who flew from across the country to get an appointment—and only four doctors in their network. Today, the company connects more than 100,000 patients with 60 doctors in the network who write prescriptions for cannabis products. With its own proprietary script software, prescriptions are sent electronically to a pharmacy, and the patient either picks it up in person or waits 24 to 48 hours for home delivery via DHL.

Today, Forbes estimates that Bloomwell has $55 million in annual revenue with a 30% margin. The company achieved profitability in 2024 and grew its number of prescriptions 3,300% from 2024 to 2025. Last December alone, about two tons of cannabis were distributed through Bloomwell’s network. The company expects to hit 25 to 30 tons of cannabis in 2026.

Niklas Kouparanis, Bloomwell’s CEO who co-founded the company with Wichmann, Samuel Menghistu and his sister, Anna-Sophia Kouparanis, says the company has been able to grow quickly.

“At the moment, we have about 15% to 20% market share [in Germany], and growing,” says Kouparanis, 37. “We started the company with a two-room practice in Frankfurt and we took it from there, scaling pretty fast.”

Germany, the EU’s largest economy, is also the continent’s largest legal marijuana market with about $944 million in sales last year, up from $500 million in 2024. Investors and North American companies project more growth in Germany, especially as the U.S. market has become more saturated and cannabis is still federally illegal. Massachusetts-based Curaleaf is the largest U.S. player in Europe right now as it has expanded to the UK and the EU in 2021 when it acquired Emmac Life Sciences, a vertically integrated medical marijuana business with cultivation sites, manufacturing and distribution facilities across Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the UK for $286 million. In February, Berlin-based cannabis producer and distributor Sanity Group was acquired by Canadian cannabis company Organigram for $287 million in a cash and stock deal.

Bloomwell has been integral to the growth of Germany’s cannabis market. The company is similar to other telehealth platforms like Ro and Hims & Hers in the U.S. Patients open the app, fill out a questionnaire and outline their medical history and a doctor reviews it.

If the doctor does not have any questions, the patient gets their prescription right away. But if the doctor has questions, or if a patient does, Bloomwell schedules a video call or in-person consultation at one of the company’s four locations throughout Germany.

“You choose the amount of cannabis, you see the price, you pay, and then the product gets delivered. It’s like Amazon,” says Kouparanis. “It is very fast, very convenient, completely digital. That's how healthcare should work.”

Bloomwell also has a few revenue streams. It sells its software and data to doctors, who use it to get patients, manage payments and electronic prescriptions, access data about what types of cannabis products work well for ailments from pain to sleep disorders, and other back-office support and logistics. (Bloomwell is not part of the public healthcare system in Germany, so patients pay out of pocket for these appointments and cannabis.) Bloomwell also cross-sells products to patients—vape devices and paraphernalia—as well as documentation to travel throughout the EU with their medical marijuana. The company’s third revenue stream comes from pharmacists, which buy the company’s software to manage inventory, orders and prescriptions. (Wholesalers are also customers, using the Bloomwell marketplace to see what types of products are most popular.) Its wholesale arm, Ilios Santé, which imports cannabis from Australia, Denmark, Spain and other countries, represents about 10% of the company’s revenues. The real value, Wichmann says, is the data it provides to doctors, pharmacists and wholesalers.

“We are a data powerhouse,” he says.

But the big innovation Bloomwell created was its certified digital prescription software, which it built in cooperation with the German government. After the German government reclassified cannabis down from a narcotic, marijuana could be prescribed digitally like other medications.

“At peak, I think we had 25 overnight carriers every single night and we had to keep that running seven days a week,” says Wichmann. “Now, we can do it all digitally.”

Nik and Anna Kouparanis were born in Wiesbaden, about an hour from Frankfurt. Their mother was a flight attendant for Lufthansa, and their father was a flight manager at the same company. Nik, who is four years older, and Anna-Sophia, 32, both studied business and economics, getting their Master of Science degrees at the European Business School, becoming the first in their family to go to college.

In 2017, Nik joined a cannabis wholesale company called Cannamedical, which imported and sold cannabis to pharmacies under the strict narcotic designation. After 18 months, he started his own company, Farmako, which was also in the wholesale cannabis business, and a year later he sold it Canadian pot company AgraFlora Organics for $15 million. (Farmako is Greek for "medicine," an homage to the Kouparanis' Greek heritage.)

Anna, who worked for her brother at Farmako, decided to start her own wholesale business, Ilios Santé, in 2019. (Anna would make the Forbes Germany Under 30 list in 2021.) Nik, on the other hand, had met Wichmann at a friend’s party and the two started discussing how they could grow the cannabis market by connecting patients with doctors and pharmacies through an app.

In June 2020, Nik put up $50,000 for the proof of concept and they started Bloomwell in a co-working space and a rented doctor’s office with the goal of becoming Germany’s dominant telehealth company focused on medical marijuana. “We started the business very lean,” he says.

But their parents were not sold on the idea.

"My dad said, ‘You have studied at a well-known university and now you want to sell drugs? How should I tell your mom?’" Nik remembers. “Today you don't hear that from my dad anymore. He understands.”

In the fall of 2021, the company raised a modest $10 million at an estimated valuation of $60 million (the cannabis market had crashed in the U.S., driving down multiples). German actor and director Moritz Bleibtreu, M4 Capital, Artemis Growth Partners and Measure 8, which is Boris Jordan’s, the CEO of Curaleaf, family office, all invested in the company. Forbes estimates the company is currently worth about $250 million.

The company started getting patients from all over Germany just to get an appointment and pick up medical bud.

“It was crazy in the beginning, we only had a practice in Frankfurt, but we had patients coming from Bremen or Hamburg, which is very far away,” says Anna. “They actually took a flight to get medical cannabis treatment. That’s when we thought, ‘Wow, there is a real big demand and we should expand all over Germany.”

While Bloomwell is still only available in Germany—where only about 1 million people have received medical marijuana prescriptions—expanding throughout the EU is in the company’s future. (The recreational market is almost nonexistent for now. There are no dispensaries, but homegrown pot and nonprofit cannabis clubs are allowed.)

“We're always looking at other markets, but Germany is by far the most interesting at the moment.” says Nik. “There's a lot of growing potential. If we look at the indications that we are treating now, you could have 20 million people in Germany that are [able to get] medical cannabis treatments. It’s still a long way to go and we want to be the machine driving it, helping the market grow to that size.”

Will Muecke, the founder of cannabis investment firm Artemis Growth Partners and a Bloomwell board member, says the real value of Bloomwell is its ability to grow the market thanks to its network of patients, doctors and pharmacies.

“You can't have growth in Germany without telemedicine. You can't do it through terrestrial services and patient visits,” says Muecke, explaining that Bloomwell has the largest patient roll in Germany. “In the future, Bloomwell is going to be not only important to Germany, but it's going to be important to the overall global rollout of cannabis.”

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