2026 Letter from the CEO
Living in Montana has some perks! Fishing near Glacier National Park, 2025
Dear Friends,
Gaize had a banner year by all measures in 2025. We onboarding some incredible brands, made radical improvements to our product, and conducted critical research. Our monthly testing volume now exceeds the total for the first half of 2024. This growth, though anticipated, was taxing to our system and to the capacity of our small team. I’m humbled by the way our staff has risen to the challenges we faced and, to a person, I couldn’t ask for a better or more capable group of people to build a company with.
In 2025, we conducted clinical trials investigating cannabis edibles and psychotropic prescription drugs. We launched a massive simplification to our user interface on both web and mobile apps and tackled some significant challenges with connectivity and robustness. We also invested in our impairment detection models, at almost irresponsible levels. This was met with both success and failure as we explore totally novel strategies and indicators. Today, our team is in the process of validating multiple novel indicators of cannabis impairment – things that are totally unknown to science. We believe that these novel ways to detect cannabis impairment represent the next phase of our technology. As we work to get to certainty on some inconclusive results and eliminate confounding medical issues from our platform, these indicators allow us to determine causation with unprecedented levels of accuracy. The results speak for themselves.
Today, Gaize works with 30% of the top 20 construction firms, some of the top steel and building material companies, leading manufacturers, top food brands, as well as leaders in logistics, energy, mining and safety-sensitive services. We have a great cluster of customers in the automotive sector, including an OEM and many tier 1 suppliers. In total, Gaize protects over 150,000 safety-sensitive employees with hundreds of thousands more coming online soon. Another metric that speaks volumes to the quality of businesses adopting our technology is that the average annual revenue of a new commercial customer adopting Gaize in 2025 was $9 billion. We work with the leaders - businesses that care deeply about their people, fairness and safety.
“The average annual revenue of a new commercial customer adopting Gaize in 2025 was $9 billion.”
We started quantifying outcomes for these customers for the first time in 2025, and to say that I’m blown away by what we found would be an understatement. Beginning with a customer in safety sensitive services and continuing with customers in the construction space, we’ve been looking at how Gaize has impacted safety, intangibles like culture, and the bottom line. You can review those on our whitepapers page, but the high level outcomes include:
80% Reduction in Reasonable Suspicion Incidents
0 or near 0 impairment-related incidents
Returns on Investment of over 1,000%
Easier hiring, better employee retention, and better employee relations
Award winning safety outcomes
On a macro level, we find ourselves on the precipice of the first major drug law reform in the US in over fifty years with cannabis being imminently moved to Schedule III. Gaize is positioned with the technology required to make the legal integration of cannabis into society actually safe. This is exactly the moment that I’ve been working towards and anticipating for over 8 years. However, sometimes it’s not until the world changes that you find out who your friends really are. We’re faced with rampant misinformation from many sides - both expected and unexpected.
As we face down this change, I find it critical that we as a society must maintain objectivity and act through measured, science-backed policy with corresponding technology solutions to detect actual impairment. This is the only opportunity for a fair and safe outcome. Cannabis causes a window of acute impairment measured in hours (about 2-3 for inhaled cannabis and about 3-6 for edibles). There are vested interests, but also educated people, who should know better and are attempting to muddy the waters of this scientific reality. It got so significant that we wrote a (very thorough) blog post on this issue, complete with citations to the research studies.
Here’s what we know of how to detect impairment from cannabis – there are no chemical tests that can detect impairment, or that are positive for only the window of acute impairment. This includes blood, oral fluid, breath, urine and hair. Oral fluid tests, which are commonly positive for 24-48 hours since the last use, are the preferred chemical test for good reasons, but they are not impairment tests and can struggle with edible cannabis. States and businesses that are attempting to use oral fluid tests as impairment tests will absolutely see bad outcomes. These tests are not fair ways to control cannabis impairment in the workplace or on roadways.
Despite these scientific facts, five states have chosen to create “per se” limits for THC, and are thereby attempting to regulate cannabis impairment like alcohol. There is zero scientific evidence that predictable impairment from THC occurs at any body-fluid concentration. These are purely political numbers, designed to allow law enforcement to prosecute impaired driving, but are unfair to safe and responsible legal cannabis users. They are further particularly leveraged against those without the money to defend themselves. It’s outrageous that, despite clear guidance to not use per se limits from organizations like the NHTSA (twice), the NIJ, the IACP, AAA, Reason, NORML, and scientific researchers, that some states have marched down this path. This is a clear miscarriage of justice that penalizes safe, legal and responsible cannabis use, particularly for marginalized and heavily policed populations. Now, with looming schedule III cannabis, some politicians are advocating for taking per se limits national. This cannot be allowed to happen and we’re vigorously fighting it already.
For 2026, we’re redoubling our efforts to drive Gaize into commercial use, and will continue to invest time and money to get law enforcement to move ahead with fair impairment testing. Internally, we’re continuing to invest extremely heavily in research and product development. I’m absolutely and unequivocally committed to making Gaize the most reliable, easy to use and scientifically defensible impairment detection technology in the world.
In light of the Schedule III THC move, we’re aggressively reaching out to Federal agencies to encourage a review of available impairment detection technology. Gaize stands ready to validate our technology in any independent process to assess accuracy and viability in field conditions. Our technology is used today in some of the most punishing construction and mining industry conditions. Further, since we rely on the only government recognized standard for drug impairment that exists, the Drug Recognition Expert process, Gaize is highly legally defensible and extremely accurate.
I’m more certain today than I’ve ever been that we have the right solution to meet the moment. My deepest gratitude to our team, investors, advisors, partners, advocates, friends and allies. I see you and we are going to win this.
Forward together,
Ken Fichtler
Founder and CEO
Gaize
