Pulse started between an operator and an engineer who’d watched startups scale from 50 to 100 to 300 people and watched the same thing happen every time: decision velocity collapses, the founder becomes a bottleneck, and the company’s pulse goes quiet. We sought to build the thing we wished we’d had, so that scale, handovers, and Friday-evening crises never break the operation again.
Founded in a co-working space, in the gap between Claude Sonnet 4 and the first wave of AI agents that could actually use your tools.
We’d been at companies where someone had bolted ChatGPT onto a sidebar and called it AI strategy. Impressive at the demo, ignored within two weeks.
The model was fine. The assistant had no memory of yesterday, no understanding of the company’s vocabulary, no read on what mattered to this person in this role on this Tuesday.
A brilliant intern with severe amnesia, asking you to brief it from scratch every time you opened a new tab.
So we wrote one down. An assistant should know the company. It should remember. It should read the room. It should be auditable, governable, and ours.
We called it Pulse because the thing we wanted was a sense of the heartbeat of work: what’s actually happening, who needs what, what’s about to break.
Still small, still founder-led, still revising the manifesto. Pulse is in early access with a growing group of design partners.
The public demo queue is how the next cohort gets in.
Five principles we actually hold to, not aspirations for the wall.
Every product decision starts with permissions and control. If a feature can’t be something the customer can scope, audit, and turn off, we don’t ship it.
Customer data is held in escrow against a deletion certificate. The architecture assumes we will be subpoenaed and audited, and is designed so that the answers are simple.
Every meaningful feature starts as a memo. If we can’t explain it in two pages, we haven’t understood it. Our memos are public to the team and most are public externally.
Our customers’ work is patient and structured. We optimise for hour-long agent runs that ship reviewable work, not for snappy one-shot answers in a chat box.
We use unglamorous, well-understood infrastructure (Postgres, Vercel, Supabase) and spend our novelty budget on the model layer and the permissions layer, where it earns its keep.
A solo founder, building Pulse in the open. We hire slowly; the rest of the team is on the careers page.
Operator background; product and growth at consumer + B2B SaaS companies. Builds Pulse end to end, from the policy engine to the product. Writes most of our manifestos and reads every contact-form submission on Friday.
Two doors. If you’re a team, contact us. If you’re an engineer or designer who agrees with the manifesto, see careers.