Tim Burke wandered through the empty half of Affinio’s office to the meeting room where the interview would take place.

In the early morning sunshine, this half of the open-plan office was an expanse of empty tables, and a ping pong table, but no sign of anyone working – so far.

“Oh, it will fill up,” Burke said with an easy smile when he was seated.

When Affinio, the company Burke heads, moved into the space in the spring of 2016, the co-founders wanted a lot of room for growth. The three-and-a-half-year-old social media analytics company is staffing up – fast. It had nine employees when it raised $4 million in venture capital last November. Six months later, there were about 37 employees, all but three of them in the Halifax headquarters. By the end of 2016, Burke expects to have a staff of 60, and he foresees the company’s galloping growth to continue through 2017.

“It’s pretty aggressive,” Burke said of his hiring spree, adding that most of the hires are in sales, marketing and customer support. “It’s primarily because it’s an enterprise SaaS [software-as-a-service] sales structure. It’s very similar to Radian6, and we see very aggressive growth. We’re going after accounts we think we can and should win.”

There’s no shortage of buzz in Halifax about Affinio, given its rapid expansion plans. The company does not release revenue details, but its strong funding and growing staff have turned heads.

“They are definitely one of the rising stars,” said Dawn Umlah, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Innovacorp. “Even in terms of talent acquisition, they’re working very well … I hate to say ‘killing it’, but that’s what they’re doing.”

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The buzz is nothing new for Burke and Stephen Hankinson, his technical co-founder and long-time collaborator. In the first decade of the century, they formed Quark Engineering, a small team of product whizzes that built products for themselves and others. It was a team with diverse talents, and at the core were Burke, an engineer with an entrepreneurial flare, and Hankinson, a programmer who other coders speak of in reverential tones. They struck gold in 2009 when they produced TetherBerry (later called Tether), an app that let people gain an online connection for their laptop through their cell phone plan. That consumer product brought in more than $100,000 in revenue in the first three days, and won the team Innovacorp’s 2010 I-3 Technology Startup Competition.

Tether was a cash cow for Quark and provided revenues while Burke and Hankinson built out the team, including Ardi Iranmanesh, an expert in SaaS metrics, and Phil Renaud, who is now Affinio’s VP Engineering. As well as working on their own projects, the team did contract work for several companies, including startups. Hankinson is known throughout the region for the speed and precision of his coding, and clients came to Quark to get the team to build out their technology.

Then in 2013 the Quark team began to work on a new project, which they called Affinio. It is an advanced database technology that allows low-cost, real-time processing of social network data to determine how every person on the web is connected. It mines publicly available social media posts and other business data to find people who are connected by common interests, experiences or networks.

Burke admits there are other similar products on the market but what sets Affinio apart is its ease of use, its interpretive functions and its vivid graphics. From the outset, it drew attention.

“Even at that stage, the response to the demo was overwhelming,” said Burke. “The most common response we got was, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this before.’”

The company launched in 2013 with $1.5 million in investment from Halifax venture capital fund Build Ventures. Build Principal Rob Barbara says his firm likes to invest in technology that “a few really smart guys can’t duplicate in a couple of months.” Affinio fit the bill as it immediately drew international attention. In the past three years, Affinio has been showcased at the O’Reilly Strata Conference in New York, and has participated in the Canadian Technology Accelerator in New York, the BBC Worldwide Labs incubator in London and Microsoft’s Seattle Accelerator.

And, the company is having success in sales, with 80 percent of the revenue coming from the U.S., led by the New York-based Vice-President of Customer Success John Gleeson.

“It was a really smart move for us to have a guy in New York,” said Burke. “John has a daily presence there and it’s been significant in developing and retaining clients. … We’ve got a lot more traction in the media and entertainment industries that are using our platform to guide their brand strategy.”

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Along with the sales came more funding. Whitecap Venture Partners of Toronto led a $4 million round last November, joined by Build, New York-based Social Starts, New York-based BRaVeVentures and several angels. And that money is funding the hire of a significant staff. From nine to 37 in six months and then an expected 23 more in the next seven months.

“We’re hiring a lot of great young talent,” said Burke. “It’s a really young group, most of them straight out of university.”

About one-quarter of the staff is in product development, with 35 percent in sales and marketing and the rest in executive positions and customer support. As he focuses on building his staff and the company, Burke is leaning heavily on some key mentors. First there are Marcel LeBrun, Chris Ramsey and the team that built Fredericton-based Radian6, one of the most success tech companies in the region. Burke talks with them regularly to discuss scaling of a company. And he’s found that the Microsoft accelerator has a tremendous alumni program, which has been instrumental in introducing Affinio to clients.

As the summer deepens, Burke is turning his attention more and more to a Series B round of financing, which he hopes to close in early 2017. He didn’t reveal many details but he said some clients in the media industries have investment arms that have noticed Affinio. The company is also working with clients to adapt new products, some of which analyze data owned by the clients themselves.

“With a lot of the new products, growth will continue on a really fast pace, even more fast than what we’re doing now,” said Burke. “Our revenue per customer is growing and the size of deals is continuing to rise as well.”