Center for Tobacco Products News

Like many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, James Monsees uses technology to disrupt stodgy industries. Unlike most of his Valley peers, he enjoys describing himself as a tobacco executive, which tends to elicit a mixed response. At a small dinner party recently, a handful of the other guests booed that statement, he says. “Then I explained that we don’t just make tobacco products; we’re trying to bring vaporizers to the marketplace.” The room was more sympathetic to vaporizers, typically electronic pipes that heat liquid to produce an inhalant with lower levels of carcinogens than smoke. “Eventually, they applauded,” Monsees says.

Monsees is the chief executive officer of Ploom, a San Francisco startup that emerged from Stanford University. Its loose-leaf vaporizer, the Pax, can be used to inhale heated vapor from marijuana as well as tobacco, though Ploom officially downplays that. The vaporizer—on sale in Austria, Italy, South Korea, and thousands of domestic retail stores—has become almost ubiquitous at concerts and music festivals throughout the U.S. Named one of the year’s best products by GQ and Fast Company, it’s been unofficially endorsed by actor Alison Brie of Mad Men, rapper Big Boi, and actor-rapper Donald Glover.

Ploom is also gaining traction with a novel electronic cigarette called the modelTwo. The device heats small pods of tobacco, unlike most e-cigarettes that use liquid mixtures of nicotine and synthetic materials. Seven-year-old Ploom has weathered protests from antismoking activists and says it’s profitable, but it wouldn’t disclose sales figures or other financial data. In 2011 the company took a minority investment from tobacco giant Japan Tobacco International (JTI), the global division of Japan Tobacco, which sells Camel and Winston cigarettes. “We think there is an opportunity for tobacco to be reinvented and consumed in different ways,” Monsees says.