Real-time listening and tracking platform Workstreamer has announced a $3.5 million Series A round of funding, from Austin Ventures. The round comes more than a year after Workstreamer launched with $1.5 million in seed funding from the same firm.

Based in Austin, Workstreamer is the brainchild of cofounders Hank Weghorst and Suaad Sait, seasoned repeat offenders in the local startup scene. The plan for the Series A funding is to accelerate growth, generate sales and overall improve the service for existing customers.

Focused on businesses, Workstreamer takes real-time listening to the next level. Layering in analytics tools, Workstreamer does more than just deliver tweet mentions of your company and your competitors. Workstreamer generates a digital fingerprint for businesses to weed out social and news-related conversations, making it a tool for truly tracking information. The funding will be used to develop the filtering mechanisms around Workstreamer, adding to its analytical power.

Tom Ball, Partner at Austin Ventures said, “We know there is a next generation information horizon emerging. Workstreamer is well positioned to capitalize on the distinct need for more relevant and timely business information.”

It’s the contextualization of the tracked information that becomes the major benefit for Workstreamer users. Drilling down into these digital fingerprints, Workstreamer will also be working towards building out its platform. This is where the team sees the real value, especially as it pertains to businesses’ growing needs.

Instead of paying for annual or monthly reports, the free access of business-related information on the web has left us with mounds of information. As with everything else on the web, the time has come for serious filtering. The economy around web filtering is touching every niche created during the web 2.0 wave, with the possibility of real-time delivery ensuring its relevance to your needs. While conversation-tracking has been a service available to businesses for several years now, new tools around social media, the semantic web and real-time exchange have addressed a new need.

To that end, Workstreamer will be focusing on sales professionals as it builds out and tests its upcoming features. Social media marketing has become an irreversibly intertwined medium, and established business-oriented web services like Salesforce already offer similar tools. However, Workstream is free, still offering customized reporting options, and is clearly preparing its platform for networked growth.