The Canadian startup plans to attract machine learning talent in Canada and the United States.
A split-second decision can be the difference between victory and defeat; championship ring or prize for participation. Accumulated over time, they can lead to success or failure.
“The game of basketball is very noisy… Think of us as noise canceling for decision making.”
These are the bets that Toronto and San Francisco-based startup The Intelligent Search Company is betting on (TISC) is betting that sports teams will pay. The startup enhances existing artificial intelligence (AI) models to instantly identify context and recommend actions, especially for coaching teams.
The Delaware-based company (more on that later) has emerged from stealth to secure $2.1 million ($2.9 million Canadian) in pre-seed funding, co-founders told BetaKit on Tuesday. Silicon Valley fund OVO (no relation to Drake) and Toronto-based n49p led the round, with participation from Montreal-based Panache Ventures.
TISC was founded in May 2024 by University of Waterloo graduates Mahbod “Mo” Sabbagi and Arpan Bhattacharya. They met as software engineers at e-commerce company Wish.
“We’re both very neurotic about search and software,” Sabbagi said. “Finding information has always been a challenge for us.”
It all sounds a little abstract, but it all comes together on the basketball court, the co-founders say.
TISC creates its software to be an analyst who never sleeps and can filter all the data about a team's performance: video footage, player statistics and league history.
“The game of basketball is very noisy,” Sabbagi said. “There are sources of information coming from all directions. Think of us as a noise reduction system for decision making.”
The co-founders argue that current large general language language (LLM) models are not designed specifically to select the right actions from a pool of real-time data. The co-founders said they trained niche open-source models to quickly recognize patterns in volatile situations.
For basketball coaches, this could mean AI making play suggestions at crucial times in a game, based on historical knowledge and data from similar situations.
Alex Norman, managing partner of n49p, said in a press release that TISC has created “technology that will enable any human or artificial intelligence to find exactly what they are looking for from any source or stream of data, no matter how fragmented or complex that data is, or how abstract the search query.”
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So far, he has tested his skills with NCAA Division I teams from Virginia Military Institute and the University of North Texas. It is also about to conduct its first large-scale pilot with the Women's Premier Basketball Association in the Bay Area.
TISC plans to hire machine learning talent, expand early pilots and “build relationships” in target markets. We currently only have two (and a half) people helping us: Bhattacharya, Sabbagi, a machine learning researcher, and a new intern from McGill University.
According to the co-founders, sports is just the first “beginning ground” for TISC, and the stakes are relatively low compared to the markets it wants to eventually target, such as emergency lines, wildfire-fighting technologies and even the defense context.
“Even if it is only a small percentage of revenue in the future, we see it as an efficient laboratory,” Bhattacharya said.
Despite backing from venture capitalists in the United States (US) and Canada, TISC is registered in Delaware, which Bhattacharya said is “the standard” for companies like theirs planning to operate in both countries.
“The reason we have one foot in Canada and one foot in America is because it allows us to tap into both talent pools,” Sabbagi said.
They are not alone; Colare CEO Nain Abdi explained Podcast BetaKit Earlier this week, interest and venture capital opportunities brought his Canadian startup to Silicon Valley. This summer, Canadian tech leaders, including Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, called on Canadian founders reject pressure from American venture capitalists register a company in the USA.
Image courtesy of CTIP.
