Draft:DeCervo

deCervo LLC commonly referred to as deCervo, is an American neurotechnology company specialized in making software applications for decision-making optimization. The company is a defense contractor and primarily makes products for sports use, while later products have been for police and law enforcement use. The company was founded in 2014 by Jason Sherwin and Jordan Muraskin with the goal of improving human performance, especially in high-speed decision-making.

2012–2013: Research Pre-Founding
In 2012, Sherwin and Muraskin published their first study on the brain signals associated with deciding on different baseball pitches. In a follow up study, they looked at how these signals compared between real baseball hitters and age-/gender-matched controls. In 2013, Sherwin published a study done with the United States Army characterizing the brain signals associated with decisions in a defensive combat environment. In a later follow up study, he would explore how those signals compared between Army veterans / others with small arms experience and naïve civilians.

Sherwin and Muraskin published an abstract and presented at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2013. That same year they attended the Sabermetrics, Scouting and the Science of Baseball conference, later speaking at that event in 2015. From these exposures to professional baseball, they decided that an industrial application of their research was possible.

2014–2016: Founding
In 2014, Sherwin and Muraskin founded deCervo under its first name “Neuroscout,” having won $10,000 in seed money and a spot in the new Startup Lab of Columbia University. Scientific and popular press noted the company’s similarity in name and focus to another company called “Neuroscouting.”

To avoid confusion, the company changed its name to “deCervo” in 2015. The origin of the company name is reportedly linked to a girlfriend of Sherwin at the time. Being French, she suggested du cerveau, or “from the brain”, as a company name. Sherwin and Muraskin anglicized the phrase to alliterate with “decisions,” resulting in the name “decervo”, or its more common capitalization as “deCervo”. Keeping its original focus, deCervo’s focus remained to explore the neuroscience involved in sports and to specialize in high-speed decision-making.

In 2015, deCervo began to service its first clients in College and Major League Baseball. That same year, while finishing studies at Columbia University, Sherwin and Muraskin published two more studies on the brain signals related to baseball hitting. They showed that there were distinct brain signal detectable with functional magnetic resonance imaging (or fMRI) before a pitch that indicated the hitter’s performance on the upcoming pitch. They also showed the distinct spatio-temporal patterns of brain activity across electroencephalography (EEG) between Division I hitters and age-/gender-matched controls. Sherwin found a similar result among United States Army veterans and others with small arms experience vs. age-/gender-matched controls. He found similar results among professional musical instrumentalists too.

In 2016, deCervo’s work in College and Major League Baseball expanded. Sherwin and Muraskin published two more scientific papers. The first showed a more detailed spatio-temporal pattern of brain activity across simultaneous EEG and fMRI among baseball hitters. The second showed indicative structural and functional differences via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of baseball hitters vs. controls. These studies provided further direction to the early days of the company.

2017–2020: Growth in Baseball, Hockey and Defense Contracting
During 2017-2020, deCervo continued to scale its role in hitter development for Major League Baseball. By 2018, six Major League Baseball teams were working with deCervo to train their hitters via their baseball product, uHIT. Their work pinpointing exact moments when these hitters decide to swing at an incoming pitch became the focus of widely distributed popular science articles, books ad documentaries. By 2019, Major League Baseball clubs favored using uHIT mostly for Minor League Baseball hitters needing to develop their pitch recognition skills.

Starting in 2018, deCervo began its development of a tool to train the referees and linesmen of the National Hockey League. This idea originated from an interview and followup discussions with the late NBA Commissioner, David Stern.

Also, in these years, deCervo began its multi-year relationship with the United States Army. In 2017, it began its basic science research work for the Army to contribute to fundamental understanding of the neurobiology of expertise.

Like many businesses, deCervo’s operations were scaled back in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but they remained active in softball and professional baseball, particularly with its Korean Baseball Organization client, the Hanwha Eagles.

2021–2023: Launch in Policing, Expansion in Hockey
As early as 2018, deCervo began to speculate publicly about the application of its decision-training techniques to law enforcement and policing. By 2021, deCervo had partnered with the New York City Police Department for insight and developed a new product to help law enforcement officers improve their decision-making.ref> This new product, “e-TRAIN,” incorporated real bodycam footage and measures reactions police officers have in those moments.

After its third season training National Hockey League officials, deCervo started supplying uCALL for Officials to the East Coast Hockey League (ECHL) and American Hockey League. Starting in 2022, uCALL became the “Official Decision Training Tool of the ECHL.

Management and Investors
deCervo is managed by its founders, Jordan Muraskin (Chief Technology Officer) and Jason Sherwin (Chief Executive Officer). deCervo is privately held, with Dr. Brad Berman and Kenneth Lerer recognized as investors among others since 2015.