Clarabridge’s technology is designed to help companies make sense of textual data from sources such as call centre notes, emails, transcripted audio, survey responses and social media.

Jaffrey (pictured) said: “Clarabridge is in an extraordinary position right now, with the confluence of having a mature, robust sentiment and text analytics solution, and huge pent up demand for a solution that helps companies harness the voice of their customers into understandable, and most importantly, actionable insights.”

At a launch event yesterday founder and CEO Sid Banerjee said: “We believe the time is right to make the investment in international expansion.”

The market for text and sentiment analytics nearly doubled in size between 2009 and 2010, Banerjee said, and has withstood tough economic conditions. “We had one of our best performing years in 2009 when the US was in the depths of recession. A big reason for that was we demonstrated efficiency. We took many companies that were spending a lot of money to manually understand, interpet and act on customer feedback, and we automated that process with technology so they could spend the time actually making decisions.”

Clarabridge has also announced a new version of its software, which adds French and Portuguese language capabilities, and can incorporate data from Lithium, NM Incite, Buzzmetrics and Radian6.

Banerjee, together with co-founder Justin Langseth, spun off Clarabridge in 2006 from business intelligence consultancy Claraview, which was later acquired by Teradata.

The firm, based in Reston, Virginia, counts Disney, Gap, QVC, Zynga and Walmart among its clients.