Marketers aren’t the only ones looking to keep track of what’s happening in the social sphere. A group of Wall Street heavyweights joined the fray this week after pouring $130 million into Dataminr Inc. to boost its efforts to help identify the shifting sharing patterns that often prelude major events around the world.

Stock fluctuations and other large-scale price movements are regularly influenced by the kind of sudden sentiment swings that occur on social networks, but the reach of such changes extends far beyond the trading floor. The ubiquity of services like Twitter guarantees that practically every notable beep on the global radar instantly becomes public knowledge.

Extracting the relevant subset of information from the continuous stream of interactions crisscrossing the web is prohibitively difficult. That’s where Dataminr comes in, with event detection technology angled specifically toward the time-dependent interests of customers in finance, news and the public sector.

The software works the same way as more conventional analytic services built for marketers. It filters the 500 million tweets that flow through the social sphere every day based on high-level metrics such as urgency and impact. But instead of focusing on how people react to advertising, the startup looks for developing stories that hold more strategic significance for decision-makers.

Dataminr automatically gleans the importance of an event from the social ripples created in the aftermath, connecting the dots among tweets around, say, an area  that just experienced an as- yet-unreported natural disaster and corroborating the activity with recent weather warnings. That approach captures a fuller picture of what’s happening and weeds out inconsistencies in the process.

The end result is a carefully-curated feed that the company claims displays only the patterns and news that are directly relevant to the interests of each user in real-time, often before a story has the time to hit the headlines. That’s naturally appealing to the financial big-wigs behind the new investment in Dataminr, who stand to benefit tremendously from gaining the ability to identify major events before the rest of the market.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Glynn Capital Management and the venture capital arm of Credit Suisse Group AG, are among the more than dozen participants in the round, which brings the five-year-old startup’s valuation to a reported $700 million. The money will help fuel founding CEO Ted Bailey’s plans to expand into new areas, namely helping enterprises track their supply chains and employees.