Zartico, a company using data intelligence, analytics and visualizations to help destination tourism organizations such as Visit North Carolina, Travel Alaska, and the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau make data-driven strategic and operational decisions, has secured $20 million in Series A funding. The funding was led by Arthur Ventures, a Minneapolis-based venture capital firm with deep expertise in B2B software, with participation from Peterson Partners. Zartico has raised a total of $24.5M to date and, since its March 2020 launch, has more than 180 customers.

“The visitor economy contributes 10% to the global GDP, yet it is one of the last to embrace big data and analytics, relying instead on quarterly and yearly reports that are almost instantly outdated,” said Sarah Lehman, CEO, Zartico. “By layering and analyzing rich datasets, we provide some of the world’s most popular destinations with insight into where their visitors are coming from and the attractions driving the most interest, enabling them to better market, and more importantly, manage their visitor economy more effectively.”

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Zartico’s integrated data model™ offers its customers anonymized geolocation, spend and event data for visitors and destinations in real-time. By layering this proprietary data on top of both customer data (CRM systems, social platforms, etc.) and publicly-available data (jobs, TSA, etc.), Zartico provides a comprehensive view of visitor behavior and activity. Destinations will now have an even clearer view of the visitor economy with the new and improved Zartico Destination Operating System version 3.0.

“Smart destinations represent an $18B market and the company that can provide the most detailed and actionable data around diverse visitor economies will surely capture this massive opportunity,” said Ryan Kruezinga, general partner at Arthur Ventures and new Zartico board member. “Zartico is well positioned to accomplish this, as not only does it have the industry’s most advanced analytics, but also the domain expertise to win the trust of tourism destinations across the country.”

Zartico’s new financing will be used to grow its engineering and product teams, expand its machine learning, AI and predictive capabilities, acquire new proprietary data sets and expand into new markets such as sports venues, airports and municipalities. Zartico, which currently has 61 remote employees – over 50% of which are female – is aggressively hiring and anticipates a 70% jump in headcount in the next six months.

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Additionally the launch of 3.0 ZDOS® features a proprietary Integrated Data Model™ comprising the highest frequency and highest resolution geolocation data, spending data, and event data for both residents and visitors within the destination.

“When we started working with Zartico we were hungry for real-time data that could tell us which areas of our state have the greatest opportunity for growth and how our visitor economy can support the state’s economy,” said Wit Tuttell, Director of Visit North Carolina and US Travel 2022 State Tourism Director of the Year. “Working with Zartico, we’ve been able to more effectively target our marketing efforts and increase partnerships to increase jobs throughout the state. After seeing the benefits of making data-driven decisions, we will never go back to the data stone age.”