Frrole, a Bangalore-based startup specialising in Twitter analytics has raised close to a quarter of a million dollars in a round of Angel funding. Frrole is one of several Indian startups that are now starting to grow and expand globally, in this case aided by crowd-funding platform LetsVenture, aimed at helping find investors for Indian startups to scale their businesses.
Per month, Frrole trawls through 500 million tweets to analyse its content and provide connections, patterns, and insights about users. For those wishing to use these insights about what is being said at a given point about a given topic on twitter, the information costs about $100 each month. But as with many businesses in the tech-sector, the challenge lies in growth – in this case keeping up with the asthmatic growth of Twitter. A co-founder of Frrole, Amarpreet Kalkat, said this: “We have built a decent system, but it is far away from competitive scale yet (we work with around half a billion tweets a month, Twitter has half a billion everyday). It works ok for us as we have started with focus on India market, but we are super-aggressive with our goals.”
Kalkat goes on to say that while they are currently only going through between two and three percent of twitter data, they not only aim to go through all of twitter, but the whole social web. The company also wants to add new layers of analysis, both semantic and contextual. “We would probably build algorithms targeted at verticals beyond media and brands, and might go for retail and a few others. There is something we have experimented with, we call it ‘Behaviour as a service’,” Kalkat finishes.
Not only Frrole, but Indian startups more generally are certainly a scene to watch. With crowd-funding platforms gaining traction in India, start-ups are no longer beholden only to traditional investors given their newer options. LetsVenture, as mentioned above, and Globevestor are just two of the platforms driving funding behind many of India’s new data based startups.
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(Image Credit: Jason Howie)
