CEO John Kearon said in the company’s annual results announcement, published today, that DigiViduals brought in £141,000 in revenue last year, with four multinationals trying out the technology. The robots are programmed to represent a particular type of person and they then trawl Twitter and other social media sites to find comments, videos, photos and blog posts produced by people matching their profile.

Kearon describes it as “automated mass ethnography”. It’s one of the company’s two new products. The other, SatisTraction, is an “emotional customer satisfaction measurement tool” built around the company’s FaceTrace methodology, which has also been trialled by four multinationals, generating £121,000 in revenue.

Sales for the company as a whole last year were up 38% to £16.4m, with operating profits rising 35% to £2.2m. Growth was “purely organic”, chairman Ken Ford said.

The UK returned to “significant” growth, the company said, with revenue up 42%. North America was up 61% and new offices in Switzerland and Germany grew by 62% and 41% respectively. The Netherlands continued to show a decline, with full-year revenue down 12% (compared to 9% at the half-year mark). As well as management changes, BrainJuicer said, the Dutch office also had to contend with declines in revenue from its largest client due to internal changes in research spending patterns.