Quick answer

How does Via know who actually knows whom?

Most tools assume that if two people are connected online, they "know" each other. Sales teams know that's not true. A social connection is not a working relationship, and a second-degree mutual is often meaningless.

Via takes a different approach — grounding relationships in real history rather than assumed proximity. The difference between seeing that two people are connected on LinkedIn and knowing they spent three years on the same team at the same company is the difference between a dead-end intro request and one that actually converts.

What Via looks at

Via uses public and partner data to establish who overlapped where, for how long, and in what roles — without depending on LinkedIn connection data. On top of that, Via models relationship strength using structured signals:

  • Long, close collaboration outweighs distant org overlap
  • Multiple shared roles outweighs a single brief connection
  • Recent work outweighs outdated history
  • Startup overlap is weighted differently than enterprise overlap — size matters

When users opt in, private signals (email, calendar, CRM) can strengthen scoring further — without exposing private content.

Why this matters for warm intros

Weak intros waste time, damage trust, and make reps hesitant to ask for help again. Knowing who actually knows whom — not just who's adjacent on a graph — is the difference between a warm intro that converts and a cold email in disguise.

How Via helps

Via surfaces only high-confidence relationships — the ones that are trustworthy, contextual, and likely to convert into a real introduction. You're not getting a list of loose mutuals. You're getting the few paths most likely to work.