Nova Scotia-based business intelligence startup Affinio, Inc. has raised $1.5 Million in venture capital from Build Ventures.

Affinio, Inc.'s tool is called Tactics Cloud, which provides sales and marketing insights using billions of strands of publicly available social and business data to help identify individuals and groups with common skills, interests, and relationships. Unlike social media monitoring solutions, Tactics Cloud focuses on social network connections to provide unique insights.

CEO Tim Burke announced the $1.5 million seed round led by Build Ventures during the company's presentation at the Startup Showcase at O'Reilly Strata Conference in New York. It was one of 12 companies from around the world invited to present at the world's leading conference for Big Data science and commerce.

'The round we just closed with Build Ventures and great reaction from our early customers validates our belief that Tactics Cloud will disrupt the social CRM market,' said Burke.

Burke and co-founder Stephen Hankinson conceived of Tactics Cloud over a year ago and have been developing the product ever since.

The company also said that small and medium-sized businesses can now begin using the product on a trial basis. Its beta test will begin in November and the company expects a full launch in early 2014.

'Companies of all sizes understand that the more they know about their customers, the better they can target, acquire and retain them. The power, speed and affordability of Tactics Cloud gives sales and marketing teams a strong advantage over their competitors,' Build Ventures' Patrick Keefe. 'The market for social Customer Relationship Management tools is now $1 billion and growing, and Affinio is well positioned to become a market leader.'

Affinio is a network intelligence startup that employs 'one of the fastest graph data analysis and machine learning technologies in the world.' Tactics Cloud meanwhile, is Affinio's first SaaS product, and leverages this graph engine technology to provide social discovery and insights for every step of the customer life cycle.