TISC’s AI Intuition: Beyond Search for High-Stakes Decisions

SAN FRANCISCO & TORONTO – November 26, 2025 – In industries where a split-second decision can mean the difference between victory and defeat, or life and death, operators have long relied on a combination of rigid playbooks and gut instinct. A new startup, The Intelligent Search Company (TISC), has emerged from stealth with a bold mission to augment this human factor with what it calls “AI intuition,” backed by a fresh US$2.1 million in pre-seed funding.

Founded in May 2024 by former Wish software engineers Arpan Bhattacharya (CEO) and Mahbod Sabbaghi (COO), TISC is tackling a fundamental bottleneck in the digital age: the inadequacy of conventional search in high-stakes, real-time environments. The company aims to provide decision-makers—and their increasingly prevalent AI agent counterparts—with instantaneous, evidence-backed insights derived from fragmented, fast-changing data streams. The funding round, which closed in January 2025, was co-led by OVO Fund and n49p, with participation from Panache Ventures, signaling strong investor belief in the need for a paradigm shift in data retrieval.

The Problem with Search in a Real-Time World

The modern enterprise is awash in data, yet accessing the right information at the right moment remains a significant challenge. Traditional search bars, built on keywords and static indexes, force users to conform their thinking to the system's logic. This friction is amplified in time-critical situations. As AI agents become more integrated into workflows, they often hit the same wall, running multiple query variations against standard search APIs, a process far too slow when every second counts.

“TISC exists because the most important, time-constrained decisions that impact human lives are still being made on hunches or rigid playbooks even though the data to guide those calls already exists,” says CEO Arpan Bhattacharya. His company’s technology is designed to find the “right needles in every kind of data haystack” and surface them instantly. This addresses what OVO Fund Partner Gianfranco Filice calls a “critical market inefficiency,” where the vast “long tail of ‘intent’” goes unexplored by systems that can't grasp context beyond keywords.

This inefficiency is precisely what TISC aims to eliminate. The goal is to create software that, in the words of COO Mahbod Sabbaghi, feels “fast and fluent in the domain, not like a slow, generic tool that forces people to think in keywords.”

AI with Intuition: Merging Reasoning and Retrieval

TISC’s core innovation lies in its architectural departure from common AI models. Instead of simply “bolting a search engine onto a large language model like a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT),” the company trains a proprietary transformer model to intrinsically learn what to remember and when to retrieve it from live data feeds. This approach fuses the acts of retrieval (finding information) and reasoning (understanding it) into a single, fluid process.

By training on dynamic data streams, these models build an understanding of context and the relationships between various inputs, enabling them to predict expected outcomes. The system synthesizes insights across multiple modalities—including text, video, and sensor feeds—to deliver a coherent, actionable picture. This integrated method reduces the need for iterative, “blind” follow-up queries, dramatically shortening the path from question to confident decision.

Bhattacharya describes the result as “AI with intuition.” He elaborates, “It understands intent, predicts deception, and prescribes counter moves, from play calling in sports to military command and control.” This capability moves beyond simple data retrieval into the realm of strategic foresight, a critical advantage in competitive and adversarial environments.

From the Court to the Command Center: Early Validation

While the vision is expansive, TISC has grounded its initial efforts in the data-rich world of sports, securing several key pilot programs to validate its technology. The company has already worked with NCAA Division 1 basketball teams and the national team of a Caribbean island nation. Its most significant partnership to date is with the Women’s Premier Basketball Association (WPBA).

Faatimah A., CEO and founder of the WPBA, sees the collaboration as essential to the league's future. “The future of sports lies at the intersection of athletic performance and technology,” she states. “What TISC is building directly supports that vision, helping us elevate the WPBA ecosystem.”

The WPBA, a premier developmental league for women’s basketball, is integrating TISC’s technology to empower coaches with real-time, data-backed decision-making. The league plans to use the platform to provide clear evidence on player development areas and to generate ready-made practice clips for athletes. By 2026, the WPBA aims to introduce an AI assistant coach powered by TISC, capable of answering plain-English questions with relevant clips and stats within seconds during a timeout. Furthermore, the league will centralize film, scouting notes, and live trends, allowing WNBA scouts to quickly evaluate talent without sifting through spreadsheets and manual tags.

This application in sports serves as a powerful proof of concept for TISC’s broader ambitions in other high-stakes domains. In emergency response, the technology could correlate emergency calls, locations of responders, and registries of vulnerable populations to optimize routing and save precious minutes. The market for AI in disaster management is already substantial, valued at over $115 billion in 2022 and projected to grow significantly. In defense, where global military AI spending is expected to exceed $30 billion by 2028, TISC’s system could be used to separate critical signals from noise across aircraft telemetry, radar tracks, and satellite updates to support battlefield command decisions.

Investor Confidence and a Crowded Field

The $2.1 million pre-seed investment underscores the market’s appetite for a more intelligent data retrieval layer. Investors see a company with a vision that extends far beyond a niche application. “Arpan and Moe are executing on a compelling vision that bridges cutting-edge research with practical deployment,” notes Alex Norman, Managing Partner at n49p. “The team has category-defining ambition, and technology that will enable any human or AI to find exactly what it’s looking for from any source or data stream.”

However, TISC is entering a competitive landscape. Incumbents like Palantir have a strong foothold in government and defense analytics, while platforms like Splunk excel at analyzing machine-generated data for IT and security. The key differentiator for TISC appears to be its specialized focus on fusing reasoning with retrieval for instantaneous decisions based on live, multi-modal data. While larger platforms offer powerful, broad analytical capabilities, TISC is betting that its purpose-built engine for speed and contextual intuition will give it an edge in environments where latency is not an option.

With its core technology built and early partnerships underway, TISC is now focused on expanding its pilot programs with professional and collegiate sports teams while building relationships in adjacent markets like emergency response and defense. The company is actively seeking organizations to test its platform, signaling a transition from development to market penetration. By focusing on the unique demands of real-time decision-making, TISC is positioning itself not just as another search tool, but as a critical intelligence layer for the future of work. Organizations interested in evaluating the technology can request a private demo by emailing arpan@tisc.dev.