• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, May 14, 2015

Ekho, a real-time data platform, this week announced it has raised $1.2 million in funding in a round led by Owen Van Natta, former COO of Facebook and EVP of business development at Zynga; and Jeff Haggin, president of Say No to Big Money and former CEO of SolutionSet.

Haggis and Van Natta also contribute to Ekho as strategic and creative advisors, per a release.

Ekho notes that it will use the funding to “build out [its] core platform and product offerings,” which revolve around the activation of real-time data, including data gathered from social Web sites.

The data is pulled from “thousands of upstream sources,” said Kent Langley, CEO, CTO and founder of Ekho. Those sources include the usual suspects of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but also included is data from message boards such as Disqus.

“We also activate private party and other publicly available data -- such as data.gov -- in addition to social data,” Langley added.

That data is used to create customer profiles Ekho asserts paints a picture of the way consumers behave across all channels. Langley said these profiles have been put to use for, competitive intelligence, loyalty program development, sales prospecting and more, including ad targeting via programmatic platforms.

The profiles are not anonymous, Langley said. “However, they are based on publicly available data,” he noted.