For high-flying Wall Street smarts and successful entrepreneurs alike, networking can be absolutely critical to their success. Those all-important connections to big shots at the biggest banking institutions and venture capital firms are often the only people that can get things moving and

The only problem is, making those connections in the first place isn’t always so easy. Unless you know someone who’s already an acquaintance of the person you want to be introduced to, chances are that the opportunity won’t arise. Social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook can help, to an extent, but even these are limited to ‘friends of friends’ in many cases – and of course, there are plenty of people who simply don’t use them in the first place.

Enter Relationship Science, or RelSci, a new ‘professional networking’ startup backed by billionaires such as Henry Kravis and Kenneth Langone that promises to transform the way in which business elites connect online.

Just imagine – the cream of the world’s power brokers, business executives and deal makers, right there at your fingertips, just a quick phone call or an email away. This is the promise of Relationship Science.

RelSci is different from LinkedIn and Facebook in that it’s not actually a social network at all. Rather, it’s a piece of software that relies on the single biggest Big Data source in the world – the internet – to work out who’s connected to who, mapping user’s relationships with its database of more than two million influential individuals in the world of big business and finance. Its aim is to foster relationships between the world’s elite, helping them to make raise money, make deals, sell products and get rich.

The way it works is dead simple too. For example, let’s say that you have a proposal you’d like to put to a Mr. Warren Buffet. You don’t know America’s richest and most famous investor and philanthropist of course, but maybe, just maybe, someone you know does. Simply enter his name into the search bar, and RelSci will do the rest, scanning through all of your personal contacts to see if anyone you know – or secondary, or tertiary contacts – does know him.

The results will illustrate how you are connected – if there is a connection – grading the strength of those connections according to the data available on the web.

There is one big limitation – RelSci doesn’t give away any emails or phone numbers, meaning you’ll still need that all-important introduction to the man himself. But at least now, you know who to ask…