There's a big problem with data, and it has to do a lot with power.
"Right now, consumer data has almost no value," Jonathan Shelon, the co-founder of Santa Fe-based startup and 2024 Inno Madness champion Tartle, said. "Because it's plentiful, it's available — companies use it without consequences."
That's the core problem Shelon and Alexander McCaig, Tartle's other co-founder and CEO, want their startup to solve. Since forming the startup in 2017, the pair and a current team of eight full-time employees and three contractors have worked to build a secure, privatized software platform, which allows customers to provide information about themselves in "data packets" that companies can pay to access.
Tartle's platform, CEO McCaig told New Mexico Inno in early February, acts as a "bridge" between individuals' data and enterprises, from health care firms to financial services companies, that want more thorough and accurate consumer data. The startup had a patent for its concept of storing, copying, transmitting and receiving value for data approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in November 2023.
Firms building artificial intelligence and machine learning models, too, can work with Tartle to get better data for those models. On average, McCaig said people provide around a dozen distinct data element about themselves per "data asset."
The startup has around 2 million users currently with 10 million data assets on the platform. Each unique data asset can cost anywhere from a few cents to about $150, McCaig said. The data tool, he added, is "freely available" for consumers and businesses to use.
User growth has come organically and more "exponentially" via social media promotion and marketing, McCaig said. The startup has a chief marketing officer, Jason Rigby, who's launching a type of "decentralized" marketing campaign to expand Tartle's reach more globally.
The idea behind that campaign, Rigby said, is to have marketing that's "boots on the ground" in different locations around the world. For instance, he said Tartle is right now doing a "big push" in Africa, but because countries across that continent are very unique, the startup wants to work with specific users in those countries.
"That's how we market, is by asking users, specifically, what resonates with them," Rigby said. "Do you like this, or do you like this? Is this cool? We can A-B test directly in the platform."
That decentralized marketing push can help Tartle's user count grow organically in various countries. But it's also pursuing "strategic partnerships" with larger entities. The startup has recently secured strategic partnerships with companies including Dynata, a first-party data firm, and Centene, a managed health care corporation.
Those partnerships, McCaig said, provide access to Tartle's platform to Dynata and Centene's users, for example, which could help Tartle's user growth expand in larger chunks.
It's a big part of the Santa Fe startup's path toward 100 million users by the end of 2024. McCaig said there's an "extremely high chance" of Tartle reaching that benchmark by the end of the year.
That's alongside the startup's organic user growth, too. Shelon said there are "thousands" of people signing up to use Tartle's platform on a day-to-day basis.
"You couple that with the fact that we're now having conversations with the types of clients that have millions and millions of their own users, and they're looking to utilize us in a capacity to engage directly with their user base," Shelon said. "We've finally gotten to a point where we've earned the privilege of engaging with somebody's customer base measured in the millions."
Reaching that user count and managing that many users on its platform means Tartle needs to hire. Shelon said the startup's full-time employee count will "roughly double" over the next year from its current eight-person full-time team.
Some of those new employees will be focused on helping Tartle expand into new client types, he added. New hires would also help develop more automation within the startup's platform.
"Every new client type requires a skill set, a vocabulary and a set of knowledge that could be unique," Shelon said. "We want to make sure that we have the right kind of people servicing those clients that can have that engagement."
Most of Tartle's current full-time employees are from New Mexico, McCaig said. It wants to hire more within the state, too, through finding new employees with expertise out of national laboratories and research universities in New Mexico.
The startup also has four advisors based in New Mexico. But in terms of investors, McCaig said Tartle has none in the state.
There's been "very little momentum" from private investors or investment funds in New Mexico, he said. While the state's been "fantastic" from an advising perspective, "in terms of taking the risk of capital deployment to companies that are doing the right thing and growing quickly, we haven't seen that," McCaig said.
He said the startup, which expects to reach positive cash flow in the next several months, has had to look outside the state for investment. It's been funded by $4 million through a mix of founders' capital and individual and institutional investors. The startup could also raise a larger Series A investment round sometime this year.
Money from that raise would go toward hiring and continued backend development and automation of Tartle's software platform.
"I don't want to have to raise a ton of capital," McCaig said. "I want to protect what needs to be protected and automate what needs automation. Our goal is speed, and capital does not always mean speed."
While Tartle has grown and plans to continue scaling in New Mexico through, hopefully, working with more companies based in the state — specifically, out of an office within the Santa Fe Business Incubator — McCaig said the startup's vision goes far beyond the Land of Enchantment. It goes far beyond even the U.S.
"It is important, like electricity is as a utility for people or telecommunications, that a system like ours is used globally as a standard," he said. "We are going to make a push to make this a global public utility, for people all over the world."
