Italy’s soccer team AS Roma has won a sequence of matches in the last weeks and that might be also thanks to the adoption of a special software developed by a startup from California called Tag.bio, The Wall Street Journal writes. That software is able to predict moves by opposing soccer teams and recalls the approach adopted in 2002 by Oakland Athletics‘ general manager, Billy Beane (called then Moneyball) based on sabermetrics.
Tag,bio is spinoff from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and has been founded by the actual chief science officer Jesse Paquette, a former computation biologist at UCSF who had developed for UCSF an application called EGAN (Exploratory Gene Association Networks); and by the chief executive officer, Tom Covington, a software enfgineering who had designed and developed race engines for Honda.
Tag.bio received 250k dollars in seed capital from Raptor Capital Management, the investment veichle of the Pallotta family. This is the same investment veichle which controls the shaeholders capital of AS Roma, which is chaired by James Pallotta. His son, Chris, is investment officer at Raptor Capital.
Now Tag.bio is looking for other 1.5 million dollars among investors in order to make its business grow beyond sports in other sectors.
