PAX Labs
Funding History
| Series E · 04/2019 | $1.7B |
|---|
About
PAX Labs is a cannabis vaporizer company founded in June 2007 in San Francisco by Stanford product-design graduates James Monsees and Adam Bowen, originally under the Ploom e-cigarette brand. The company spun off its e-cigarette business as the independent Juul Labs in 2017 and has since focused on cannabis vaporization hardware sold under the PAX brand.
- CEO
- Chris Ahern
- Employees
- ~303 (estimated)
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California
- Founded
- 2007
- Website
- pax.com
Overview
PAX Labs is a San Francisco cannabis vaporizer company founded in June 2007 by Stanford product-design graduates James Monsees and Adam Bowen, who first built the Ploom e-cigarette before pivoting the brand into cannabis vaporization hardware. The company spun off its e-cigarette business as an independent company, Juul Labs, in 2017, and has since focused on the PAX line of dry-herb and cannabis-oil vaporizers, including PAX Era, PAX Plus, PAX Mini, and the 2025 PAX Flow.
PAX raised a $420 million round in April 2019 that valued the company at $1.7 billion, but sales fell short of internal projections later that year, leading to a 25% workforce reduction in October 2019 and the departure of CEO Bharat Vasan. General counsel Lisa Sergi Trager served as interim CEO before Michael Murphy was named President and CEO in February 2020; the company also said at the time that any talk of a 2020 IPO timeline had been premature.
PAX Labs remains a privately held company as of September 2026. It continued shipping new hardware through 2025, including the PAX Flow vaporizer launched in August 2025, and no public listing, bankruptcy filing, or acquisition by another company has been found in current reporting.
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