Former Radian6 employees join ‘relationship capital’ mining startup

Brian Jackson

12 years ago

Several former Radian6 employees are now part of a new social startup based in New Brunswick, that promises to unlock more sales opportunities by mining a business’ own employees.

Described as a “relationship capital platform” Introhive says it unlocks relationships throughout a company to help sales find introductions to potential clients. A cloud-based software using data analytics to analyze the length of meetings, the frequency of connections, and the value of a contact to score relationships. Sales can then be introduced to valuable connections with proper context.

It’s different from other social customer relationship management software, says Rob Begg, vice-president of marketing at Introhive.

“It collects contact data from not only CRM but from a wide variety of sources: mail, contacts and social media,” he says in an e-mail interview. “It involves not only corporate sources but employees participate by including their contacts. They able to do this privately and share the details when they want to make an introduction.”

Begg was formerly based at the Salesforce.com-acquired Radian6. He worked at that well-known Maritimes startup alongside David Alston and Rich McInnis. Alston is the latest member of the Radian6 team to join Introhive, announcing his move in a blog post yesterday.

“For me, relationship capital is similar to that other term we often hear, social capital, but its more inclusive. The term not only covers relationship connections across social, but also those nurtured and captured in email, calendar events and in a CRM. The “capital” aspect covers who these connections are, the strength of the bond between them, and how relevant they are to any specific situation – including our jobs. You can also equate the sum of this relationship capital across an entire organization, all the while protecting each person’s privacy and making their participation a choice,” he writes in thie post.

Launched just a year ago, Introhive has already raised two funding rounds – most recently in December for a $1.8 million Series A round led by GrowthWorks Atlantic Venture Fund and the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, and previously an angel round.

The Web-based software has launched with a handful of customers, Begg says. The pricing is comparable to other CRM products, on a per-seat basis.

Salesforce.com laid off some members of the Radain6 team in a restructuring last October. But Begg, Alston, and McInnis were not included in that number, Begg says.

Introhive’s introductory video to its cloud service.