Nimble Inc., the social customer relationship management company founded by GoldMine Software Corp. co-founder Jon Ferrara (pictured), has raised $9 million in funding.

The Series A round of financing was led by Imagen Capital Partners along with Mark Cuban’s Radical Investments, Google Ventures, Indicator Ventures and a consortium of angel investors. The company earlier raised $3.5 million in seed funding.

Nimble plans to use the infusion for product development, partnerships and sales. Founded in 2009, Nimble targets the growing market for social selling tools, which integrate information from social networks and other public sources to build robust, real-time profiles of sales prospects.

The cloud service works with Microsoft Corp.’s Office 365 and Google Inc.’s G Suite to integrate interactions that take place within email, calendar and contact applications so that information about customers and prospects can be retrieved by simply hovering over a name. Nimble claims more than 100,000 business customers.

The company’s unique sidebar travels with a user and pulls up information about names and companies that appear in documents, emails and calendar entries. Nimble extracts information from social media profiles, public and internal databases into a single integrated profile that ties back to its core CRM services. It captures email exchanges, tweets and relevant social media notifications such as follows and mentions. The product also offers standard CRM features such as mail merge, reminders and contact notes.

“We have literally dozens of databases to enrich and build records into Nimble, and we make it smart for the places that you’re at,” Ferrara said. Traditional CRM systems put too much of the workload on the sales representative to capture and track contact information, he said. Many sales reps just don’t bother.

Nimble scours local sources and the web to pre-populate customer profiles, automatically adding to them as new information becomes available. “The whole idea that you should work for your CRM are over,” Ferrara said. “Your CRM should work with you, no matter where you’re working.”

Nimble started out as a direct competitor to Salesforce.com Inc., but as that company’s dominance has grown, the company has repositioned itself as more of a companion. That thinking drove the recent expansion to Office 365 and G Suite. “I originally envisioned that people would sit inside of Nimble all day. What I realized later is that we live in our inbox,” Ferrara said. “CRM should anticipate the way you work.”

Nimble is both a Google and a Microsoft Office 365 partner, and Microsoft resells the service as a path to its sophisticated Dynamics CRM suite. “Dynamics is too complicated for simple sales and marketing,” Ferrara said. “We’re like a baby step that helps those people grow into Dynamics.”

Ferrara said Nimble can also be used in conjunction with Salesforce.com by marrying the Nimble sidebar to an existing Salesforce.com contact base. The company is planning to expand integrations to Intuit Inc.’s QuickBooks and Zendesk Inc.’s customer service service. Pricing starts at $25 per user per month.

Images: Nimble