ATHLETIC fluency, friends say, is what gives the analyst his edge. Verdugo, who grew up in Málaga and now studies in Madrid, has spent more weekends on a pitch, a baseline, or a board than most ML engineers spend in front of a monitor. He insists this is unrelated. Colleagues are not so sure.

⚽ The Football Years

First sport, longest love. Verdugo is a lifelong football fan in the way that only Spaniards born under the right shade of sun can be. He follows match days with the kind of devotion that puts calendar reminders to shame; he has, on at least one well-documented occasion, optimised his university schedule around fixtures.

The obsession leaks productively into work. ProScout ($PSCOUT) and PremierBot($PREMIER) — both ML projects listed on the Verdugo Index — are direct outputs of an analyst who could not stop asking, “but statistically, who should this team have signed?”

🎾 The Tennis Discipline

Where football is the heart, tennis is the temperament. Verdugo has played tennis at a high level since childhood — long enough that the rhythm of footwork, racket prep, and between-point ritual has become, in his own words, “the quietest part of the day.”

The discipline shows up in his code: the bachelor's thesis, Tennis-Match-Length($TENNIS), is a 68,803-match dataset and a point-level Monte Carlo simulator dressed up as a final-year project. It exists because someone who has spent years on a baseline cannot, in good conscience, let the question “how long is this match going to take?” remain unanswered.

🌊 The Tarifa Religion

For two consecutive summers, the analyst was not an analyst at all. He was a windsurf instructor in Tarifa, the southernmost municipality of mainland Spain — a town defined less by its size than by the relentless Levante and Poniente winds that shape its coastline.

Sources close to Verdugo say he speaks of Tarifa with the vocabulary of a believer rather than a tourist. The board, the sail, and the chop of the Strait of Gibraltar are, for him, the place where the noise stops. “You cannot think about gradient descent on a wave,” he is reported to have said. Analysts believe this is the point.

Continued on §3 — PROFILE & CLASSIFIEDS ↓

SERGIO Verdugo Rubio sits across the table with the precise calm of a person who has already calculated three different ways the conversation could go. He is twenty-two, an AI Engineer at Vidalytics by day, the co-founder of Quetzal the rest of the time, and since July a graduate in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from IE University Madrid. On paper he reads less like a recent graduate than like a junior fund manager: a restless builder, by his own admission.

His résumé tracks the unusual arc of someone who started early and kept compounding. At sixteen, he co-founded blockchain startups Bproto Labs and Cortex Network in Colorado, helping raise approximately $1.5 million in venture capital and securing an Aleph Zero grant for a decentralised DNS protocol written in Rust. By the time most students were writing their first CV, he was translating technical roadmaps into investor-ready materials.

At MEmob+, the Dubai-based AdTech and location-intelligence firm where he interned as an ML Engineer through the second half of 2025, he built scalable AWS EMR + PySpark pipelines for production location data. The accomplishment he downplays most — and probably should not — is the audit in which he discovered that over 75% of the firm's incoming location feed was fraudulent, a finding that materially changed how the company priced its products.

He also prototyped a road-heatmap module using the Mapbox Directions API combined with geospatial optimisation, which — by his own measurement — reduced required external API calls by approximately 95%. “The constraint made the design,” he says.

Today most of his attention goes to Quetzal, the AI social media autopilot he co-founded and engineers. It absorbed his earlier video-pattern project, SocialMedia AI, and now publishes for small businesses across six networks. “Information beats effort,” he says, quoting the company's doctrine. “Authenticity beats polish.”

At Vidalytics, where he works as an AI Engineer, he says he is “learning a ton, every single week.” In between, he builds websites and AI automations for clients ranging from a Costa del Sol golf club to a Marbella real-estate agency whose blog now drafts itself.

On the wall above his desk is a quiet, paradoxical reminder of two delisted holdings: $DEGU (a corruption tracker he was forced to shut down when hosting bills became unsustainable) and $ETERNAL(a privacy-first WhatsApp memory vault, paused for the same reason). He refuses to take them off the books. “The losses,” he says, “are part of the track record.”

In his free time: football, tennis, windsurfing, and the occasional well-timed disappearance to Tarifa.