London, United Kingdom
Pulse.io (operating at pulsetech.io) is a machine learning platform founded in June 2020 by Joe Kaul that predicts the emotional response of audiences to advertising creative content before it is published, with the stated goal of maximizing return on ad spend for brands and marketing agencies. The platform analyzes factors including hue, saturation, luminance, object identification, and natural language in text to cross-correlate historical engagement data against likely future reactions. As of December 2021, the company had not yet generated revenue and was operating in a pre-launch beta phase with 50 users testing the platform.
Kaul, who was 25 at the time of the interview, funded the majority of the company's development from personal capital accumulated through running Onqor, his full-service marketing agency. Of the approximately 1,480,000 pounds burned to date, only 150,000 pounds came from outside private investors, leaving Kaul holding more than 95 percent of the equity. The team stood at 15 people, including 7 engineers, and the company was targeting a revenue launch in early 2022.
Pulse's ML prediction model had reached 97 percent accuracy on predicting emotional responses to creative content as of the interview date. The company anticipated that roughly 100 agencies would adopt the platform from day one of launch, with most expected to fall into a 2,000 to 2,500 pounds per month subscription bracket.