A Canadian co-founded startup plans to tap machine learning talent in Canada and the United States.
A split-second decision can make the difference between victory and defeat. Championship rings and participation awards. As these accumulate over time, they can make or break you.
“Basketball games are very noisy…Think of us as noise canceling for decision making.”
Intelligent Search Company (TISC), a Toronto and San Francisco-based startup, is betting that sports teams will pay the price. The startup is fine-tuning existing artificial intelligence (AI) models to instantly reveal context and recommend actions, especially for coaching teams.
The Delaware-founded company (more on that below) has come out of stealth and secured US$2.1 million (C$2.9 million) in pre-seed funding, co-founders told Betakit on Tuesday. Silicon Valley’s OVO Fund (no relation to Drake) and Toronto’s n49p led the round, with participation from Montreal’s Panache Ventures.
TISC was founded in May 2024 by University of Waterloo graduates Mahbod “Mo” Sabbagi and Arpan Bhattacharyya. The two met as software engineers at e-commerce company Wish.
“We’re both very sensitive about the search and software experience,” Sabbaghi said. “Finding information has always been a problem for us.”
It all may sound a little abstract, but the co-founders say it all comes together on the basketball court.
TISC builds software that becomes an analyst who never sleeps, able to filter all data about a team’s performance, including video footage, player statistics, and league history.
“Basketball games are very noisy,” Sabbaghi said. “Information comes in from all angles. Think of us as noise canceling for decision-making.”
The co-founders argue that current general-purpose large-scale language models (LLMs) are not built with the purpose of selecting appropriate actions from pools of data that change in real time. The co-founders claimed to have trained a niche open source model to rapidly recognize patterns even in fluid situations.
For basketball coaches, this could mean AI prompting play suggestions at key moments of a game, based on past knowledge and data from similar situations.
Alex Norman, managing partner at n49p, said in a press release that TISC has built “technology that allows humans and AI to find exactly what they’re looking for in any source or data stream, no matter how fragmented or complex the data or how abstract the search query.”
Related: For young Canadian entrepreneurs, it’s trough or valley.
So far, it has piloted its capabilities in collaboration with the Virginia Military Institute and the NCAA Division I team at the University of North Texas. The company will also conduct its first large-scale pilot with the Bay Area Women’s Premier Basketball Association.
TISC plans to hire machine learning talent, expand its initial pilot, and “build relationships” in its target markets. Currently, it only has two members (one and a half). Mr. Bhattacharya, Mr. Sabagi, a machine learning researcher who is helping out, and a new intern from McGill University.
The co-founders say sports is just the first “beachhead” for TISC, and is relatively low-risk compared to other markets they hope to eventually target, such as emergency response lines, wildfire suppression technology or even defense-related fields.
“We think it’s an effective laboratory, even if it’s only a fraction of the revenue in the future,” Bhattacharya said.
Despite U.S. and Canadian venture capital backing, TISC is incorporated in Delaware, which Bhattacharyya said is “the norm” for companies like his that plan to expand in both countries.
“The reason we have one foot in Canada and one foot in the United States is because this allows us to have a foot in both talent pools,” Sabbaghi said.
they are not alone. Colare CEO Nain Abdi explained on The BetaKit Podcast earlier this week that VC interest and opportunity brought his Canadian startup to Silicon Valley. This summer, Canadian technology leaders, including Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, encouraged Canadian founders to reject pressure from U.S. VCs to incorporate in the United States.
Feature image courtesy of TISC.
