Bangalore-based Frrole Inc. is venturing into the U.S. market with a social monitoring tool aimed at marketers that incorporates an element of artificial intelligence to provide deeper insights based on social analytics.

Called Scout, the product combines audience intelligence, social listening and on-demand research in a single platform. The AI component uses sentiment analysis and multichannel research to provide insights into personas, moods, demographics and interests of the people being monitored.

The company said its engine can deeply understand billions of social conversations and relationships using a combination of machine learning, natural language processing and named entity recognition, which is an information extraction subtask that classifies named entities in text into categories such people, organizations and locations. It uses a wide variety of public sources on the web to correlate this information.

“We can get down to linguistics at a very detailed level, understanding what the words you use and even the emoticons you use say about you,” said co-founder Amarpreet Kalkat.

Frrole emerged from the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in Bangalore in 2014 and has raised $245,000, primarily in angel financing, according to Crunchbase. It’s entering a U.S. market that has consolidated significantly over the last few years and boasts some powerful competitors. They include Sprinklr Inc., which has raised more than $228 million in venture funding, and Spredfast Inc., which has raised $138 million.

Kalkat said AI is Frrole’s competitive edge. “There’s a broad shift at play across the software industry,” he said. “Machine learning is being used by new companies to build fundamentally better products.”

Pricing information wasn’t disclosed.

Image: Frrole