Bottlenose announced this week that it has closed a $3.6 million Series A financing round led by ff Venture Capital. Existing backers Lerer Ventures, Transmedia, Advancit, Stage One Capital and Social Starts also contributed to the funding.

Bottlenose operates a social media search engine that aggregates posts from Facebook and Twitter and optimizes results based on users’ points of interest. The cloud-based solution utilizes 16 patent pending natural language and statistical techniques to connect the dots between people, location data and a wide range of other social metrics.

Users can visualize their search results using Sonar, Reader and Newspaper, a set of complementary tools that transform data into aesthetic tag clouds, feeds and streams.

Bottlenose boasts that its technology has attracted the attention of nearly nearly 100,000 marketers since it entered public beta in June 2012. The startup’s Fortune 500 customers use the platform to monitor brand health, cross-correlate social activity with stock prices, and “identify, anticipate and investigate the trends that drive their businesses.”

“We are thankful to have the support of forward-thinking investors and enterprise customers who share our vision and understand the growing importance of real-time discovery analytics applied to massive data streams. We’ve seen significant traction from Fortune 500s since the enterprise version went beta in January, both in volume of inbound, and deal size,” said Nova Spivack the founding CEO of Bottlenose. “Social networks have created an environment where rumors, breaking news stories, and customer sentiment can spike and spread globally in minutes. Big brands are now in an arms race to proactively detect and respond to these emerging issues in real-time, instead of after the fact.”

Bottlenose will use the new funding to cement its foothold in the enterprise. A subscription-based version of its search engine is set to hit general availability later this year.