The person behind Databrain

Darío Treco brings together an unusual combination: engineer, researcher and sensory perception specialist, all at once. He holds a degree in Marketing (UADE) and a Master's in Neuromarketing from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), with executive education at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern), and is currently pursuing doctoral research.

His path explains how Databrain works. He learned to code at IBM; at Givaudan he specialized in perception and sensory marketing for the food industry, a field where the gap between what someone says and what their body actually registers is enormous. That is where he found the underlying problem: traditional market research rests on participant self-report — one of the least reliable sources there is — and ends up misdirecting the campaigns that depend on it.

Out of two skill sets that rarely meet in one person — the rigor of someone who builds their own analysis tools and the intuition of someone who understands how the body perceives — came his biometric analysis method, today the core of Databrain: read the consumer's real response, not the one they report.

Across more than ten years as an entrepreneur he has run over 200 neuromarketing studies, alongside ventures in construction and in food and beverage import and distribution. In academia he taught at UADE and Universidad de Palermo, designed undergraduate and graduate programs, helped shape the Master's in Neuromarketing at Universidad de Las Américas (UDLA) in Ecuador, and collaborated with AINEM, the Italian neuromarketing association.

He also leads the curation and rollout across Latin America of the artificial intelligence technology from Neurons Inc., which Databrain works with under license.