With a fresh wad of cash from two leading tech investors, Halifax-based social media-analysis company Leadsift on Tuesday launched its new API to further help companies understand the characteristics and intentions of their customers.

Leadsift said in a statement that OMERS Ventures of Toronto and Salesforce Ventures of San Francisco have invested in the company, though it would not reveal the size of the investment. The company will use the money for product development, sales and marketing.

“The unique combination of insight analytics and social media that LeadSift is bringing to the market is what attracted us to this team,” OMERS Venture Director Damien Steel said in a statement. “We believe the company can set a new benchmark on what sales and marketing team should know about their customers and through innovative product offerings can help them achieve that.”

Developed over the past four years, Leadsift’s technology allows users to mine social media to learn a range of characteristics about potential customers as well as their intentions. The software can sift through countless social media posts and identify more than 100 characteristics of the people in the user’s market. That helps it to refine its messaging and marketing.

Leadsift has now enhanced the customer’s ability to understand the technology’s findings with the release of the Consumer Insights API. An API, or application program interface, is a tool that allows different software components to interact and the Consumer Insights API helps the Leadsift software work with its clients systems.

“CRM [customer relationship marketing], Marketing Automation, Influencer Marketing and Media Buying platforms are reimagining how to differentiate their product offerings and grow their business,” said LeadSift CEO Tukan Das. “APIs offer a way to achieve this with minimal investment and disruption to existing resources.”

The statement said that Halifax-based InNetwork, an influence marketing software platform, has implemented the API into its Influence Marketplace, which helped it to capture new business.

“LeadSift is a great partner in providing the data we need to make our product more robust, said Jonathan Seller, VP Product and Technology InNetwork. “Their API is unparalleled in its ease of use, quality of support and the rich insights it provides. It has helped InNetwork customers find influence partners that better match their brand.”

Leadsift first received $500,000 in investment from OMERS Ventures in November 2012, months after Das and Steel met at a MentorCamp event in Halifax. Gerry Pond, the chairman of East Valley Ventures, and a range of other investors also invested at that time.

This is the first time Salesforce Venture – the VC arms of the cloud computing giant Salesforce.com – has invested in Leadsift, though the Leadsift software has been available on the Salesforce marketplace for several years.

Though Leadsift struggled through a couple of tough years, it unveiled a new platform in December 2013 and last year generated a surge in revenue growth.

LeadSift was founded by four data scientists: Das, Sreejata Chatterjee, Hatem Nassrat and Daniel Allen. Its product is used by several global brands and agencies and has processed over 2 billion social conversations to better understand buying audiences.