Aubrey Amatelli wants to help dispensaries and cannabis retailers navigate one of the toughest parts of the industry: money. When the company she worked for right out of grad school was acquired by JPMorgan, Aubrey entered the complex world of payments and has stayed there for her entire career. After a decade of rising through the ranks at one of the most esteemed financial institutions in the world and learning everything she could, Aubrey left JP Morgan to be the CFO of a smaller fintech company, where she was the only woman in the C-Suite or the board. When she got sick of being in the “boy’s club” and dealing with toxic leadership, she left to start her own company (born and raised in Silicon Valley, she’s always had a passion for startups). Enter PayRio.
As the first payment provider focused exclusively on alternative medicines, PayRio works with hundreds of dispensaries across the country to solve the ever-irksome question of legal digital payments in a world where cannabis is legalized in many states but not yet at the federal level. Aubrey founded PayRio to address the lack of payment infrastructure in alternative medicine spaces that is both reliable and compliant within one of the most complex and highly regulated sectors.
“It’s a full-circle moment to be able to take my big bank institutional knowledge and bring it to the world of cannabis,” Aubrey says. She’d been involved in the cannabis business in an ancillary way since 2010, when she met her children’s father, who was a home grower in Santa Cruz at the time. With him and other friends, Aubrey saw firsthand how deeply the whole cannabis industry struggled with the credit and debit dilemmas in an increasingly cashless world. With PayRio, she was finally able to apply a decade’s worth of financial expertise to an industry that desperately needed her help.
Aubrey affectionately refers to PayRio as her fourth child, but not in the way other out-of-touch tech founders might. As a CEO and a single mom, Aubrey is compassionate, empathetic, and kind regardless of what hat she’s wearing. “I lead with my heart,” she says. “I’m always going heart-first.”
In fact, she built PayRio with fellow mothers in mind. “One of my missions when I started PayRio was I wanted a safe place for women to work and grow in their careers,” Aubrey says. Today, PayRio’s tight-knit employee base is over 80% women, 50% of whom are stay-at-home moms. Both the fintech and cannabis industries are still dominated by male leaders, and Aubrey wants to change that. “It still needs work,” she says. “There are so many amazing female groups, but we’re still such a minority in the cannabis space.”
As a heart-forward leader, Aubrey fosters a work culture that recognizes both professional and personal accomplishments, united by a powerful sense of purpose, where each employee has a chance to influence rapidly changing industry standards. Every PayRio employee has autonomy to get their work done and live their own lives as they see fit, thanks to management trust, schedule flexibility—90% of the staff work remotely—and unlimited paid time off. For the last two years, PayRio has topped the list as one of Cannabis Business Times’ best companies to work for. For Aubrey, this recognition is “the biggest honor of all honors,” she says. “We have a really tight community culture at PayRio and aim to treat everyone with respect and trust.”
Her personalized care and commitment to forward progress are strong, even when it might be easier or better for business to be selfish. “I’m a big proponent of federal legalization, even though that will change my world dramatically,” she says. One of PayRio’s core products is a digital payments terminal that federal legalization would render obsolete. “Even though we would lose a large part of our revenue, I’m here because I love the plant,” says Aubrey. “I don’t want to see dispensaries struggle.”
But along with being an empathetic leader, Aubrey is also a savvy businesswoman. She’s currently building Energy Payments as a sister company alongside PayRio that supports CBD products and ecommerce without touching cannabis directly. While PayRio started as a solution for dispensaries, they’ve recently expanded into a B2B credit card and ACH solution that comes with a QuickBooks plug-in, born of other cannabis brands’ clear need for an easier, more streamlined way to collect payments from dispensaries. While Aubrey might be a bit more pessimistic about her ability to change the cannabis industry as a whole, she’s certainly doing her part.
As if being a single mom and fintech CEO didn’t keep her busy enough, Aubrey also serves as the chair of the Banking and Financial Committee for the National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA), where she helps shape the future of financial access in cannabis and attends lobby days on Capitol Hill to advocate for federal legalization. She’s also on the advisory board of Colorado-based non-profit Moms on Mushrooms (MOM), an organization that promotes safe microdosing with a special emphasis on responsible use for mothers.
Aubrey herself is three years sober from alcohol, choosing to rely wholly on plant medicines now. Her favorite nightly ritual is smoking a joint and stargazing in her front yard from her new hammock chair after her kids go to sleep. Right now, her flower of choice is the organic, sun-grown Pink Jesus sativa from Sonoma Hill Farms. When she wants a gummy, she reaches for her Space Gem tins. “The owner Wendy [Baker] does an incredible job,” Aubrey says. Along with Aubrey herself, both brands are local to Northern California.
*Note: Aubrey is featured in the images with Chase Nightingale, PayRio’s Head of Marketing
