MachinePulse

Notes compiled from publicly available sources. Last updated: 2026-07-29. Every figure is linked to the source it came from and dated. Verify against primary sources before relying on them.

TL;DR

MachinePulse Pte. Ltd. is a Singapore-registered company building what it calls "Proactive AI Agents" (careers page; Undated; accessed 2026-07-29). Its corporate site is a one-page holder; the substance sits in three separate properties: Karpo, a free consumer AI that lives in iMessage and recommends places and events in six cities; World2Agent (W2A), an Apache-2.0 protocol for feeding real-world signals into AI agents; and Shotwright, an MIT-licensed agent that drives Adobe After Effects inside a Windows container.

• Karpo launched publicly on 2026-03-09 and reported 520,000+ recommendations delivered, 4M+ conversations, and a "near-40% immediate positive response rate" as of 2026-07-28.
• The only funding statement found is the company's own, repeated on the careers page and inside a job description: "backed by top-tier USD funds, with a valuation approaching $100 million". No round, investor, or date has been announced anywhere found.
• The careers site lists 20 active roles (jobs API; accessed 2026-07-29). 18 are located in Shanghai, one in New York; every role offers Singapore, Shanghai, New York, and California Bay Area as location options. The engineering roles describe Go and Python backends, Kubernetes on AWS/GCP/Azure, an iOS client, and an in-house LLM post-training team.
• The GitHub organisation was created 2025-11-11, lists Singapore, and holds 6 public repositories; world2agent had 1,245 stars and 40 forks when accessed 2026-07-29.
• Leadership is identifiable only from LinkedIn, and only with a logged-in session: Leah Wang, CEO since January 2026 (ex-ByteDance Strategic Product Manager to November 2025); Nanqun Chen, co-founder and COO since December 2025 (ex-ByteDance, currently also listed as Lead Product Manager at StepFun); Lucas Wu, founding member since December 2025 (ex-Tencent, ex-Z.ai Z Fund). No name appears on any company-controlled surface.
• Karpo runs on iMessage through Linq's messaging infrastructure, stated by a MachinePulse founding member and confirmed on Linq's community page.
• Name collision: an unrelated industrial-IoT company also called MachinePulse (Mumbai, machinepulse.com) dominates search results and startup databases. Crunchbase, Tracxn, and GetLatka entries for "MachinePulse" describe that company, not this one.

Basic

The corporate site, careers page, Karpo pages, and LinkedIn profile are continuously updated pages without publication dates; all were accessed on 2026-07-29. The corporate site carries no about page, team page, press index, address, or registration number.

Identity and legal entities

Two unrelated businesses use the name MachinePulse. Establishing which one a source describes is a prerequisite for every other fact on this page.

The India company is the one described by Crunchbase, Tracxn, and GetLatka; those profiles carry founder, revenue, and headcount figures that do not apply to the Singapore entity. No database entry for the Singapore entity was found (searched 2026-07-29).

Search listings on uspto.report show four US trademark applications filed under the owner name "Machinepulse Pte. Ltd.": KARPO (99653628), KARPO (99653232), K (99653634), and MACHINEPULSE (99653745). The individual record pages returned HTTP 403 when accessed on 2026-07-29, so filing dates, status, and the owner's address were not verified. The stated goods and services cover SaaS for artificial intelligence, machine learning and generative models, and software for configuring and managing autonomous AI agents and workflows.

Product

Karpo

A free consumer AI assistant for city discovery, reached by texting a US number (+1 415 886 0326) from iMessage, and also described as available as an app (Karpo home, how it works, FAQ; all accessed 2026-07-29).

• What it does — recommends restaurants, bars, galleries, live music, and events; learns preferences from the conversation; can be added to an iMessage group chat to help a group converge on a plan (FAQ).
• Coverage — "knows New York City, San Francisco, and London the best"; also serves Miami, Los Angeles, and Singapore (about page).
• Booking — integrated booking through Ticketmaster, Viator, Expedia, and Klook (2026-07-28 release).
• Editorial — a weekly column, "Karpo's Finds", described on a company comparison page as 1,000–1,500-word, citation-backed pieces pinned to a specific neighborhood across 12 named lifestyle tags (comparison page). This is the content behind the /explore/ and /city-guides/ sections of the site.
• Price — free; the FAQ answers the cost question with "Yes" to being completely free, and a company comparison page states "Karpo is $0/year" with "the full product — unlimited iMessage chat, Karpo's Finds editorial access, proactive recommendations — is free". No paid tier, subscription, or in-product purchase is documented.
• Form factor — the same page states "Karpo does not have its own app icon. It is an iMessage extension."

World2Agent (W2A)

An open protocol, presented at world2agent.ai and developed at github.com/machinepulse-ai/world2agent under Apache 2.0. It standardizes how AI agents perceive external data, on a World → Sensor → Agent model: sensors are independent npm packages that watch a data source and emit signals in a common schema, and agents consume those signals.

• Design constraints stated in the architecture doc: the protocol is "natural-language-first"; sensors stay neutral — they do not make value judgments, assume where they run, or define routing, prioritization, or actions.
• Transports: stdout piping, HTTP POST, WebSocket / Server-Sent Events, and consumer-defined custom transports.
• Agent runtimes with native plugins: Claude Code, Hermes, OpenClaw (README).
• Publishing: sensors are built with a build-w2a-sensor skill, published to npm, and registered on SensorHub.
• Roadmap: a graph layer to compose and enrich signals from several sensors before delivery.

The company describes the protocol as complementary to MCP rather than a replacement (Chinese write-up, 2026-04-29).

Shotwright

github.com/machinepulse-ai/shotwright, MIT-licensed, Python, created 2026-05-18. A chat-driven product in which a Copilot or Codex agent operates a real Adobe After Effects install inside a Windows container: it plans footage, prepares assets, writes JSX automation scripts, hands them to nexrender for headless rendering, and streams the finished mp4 to the browser. Stack badges in the README name Windows Containers LTSC 2025, After Effects 2026, FastAPI 0.110+, React 18, and Node 20+. The README states the goal is "not generic AI video automation" but a reproducible AE runtime with an agent layer on top. The repository carries a Simplified Chinese README alongside the English one.

Commercialization

No revenue mechanism is documented for any of the three products. Karpo is free with no paid tier described, World2Agent and Shotwright are permissively licensed open source, and no enterprise offering, pricing page, or sales contact exists on any of the properties reviewed on 2026-07-29.

Reported scale over time

The 4M+ conversations figure sits against 520,000+ recommendations over the same period; the release does not define either term or state a user count.

Announced partners

The release does not state whether the booking integrations are commercial agreements, affiliate arrangements, or public API usage.

Stated plans

The clearest statement of commercial direction is in a job description rather than any announcement. The Senior Manager, Commercial Operations posting (created 2026-05-10) sets the remit as building "a North American Local Life Platform": constructing a supply-side operations system and independently driving external partnerships. It names the platform types the company wants that experience from — Yelp, OpenTable, Resy, Booking.com, Google Places, Eventbrite, SeatGeek — and asks for 3+ years in North American local life, travel, or hospitality.

Other postings define the target markets as North American cities, primarily New York and Los Angeles, with Japanese and Korean markets named as a secondary cultural focus, and the acquisition surfaces as Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, YouTube, X, Google and Meta paid media, plus SEO and ASO.

The AI Product Manager and several other postings describe the product as being at the "0-to-1" stage.

Founder

No founder or executive is named on the corporate site, the careers page, any Karpo page, any repository, or any press release. The GitHub organisation has no public members. Leadership is identifiable only from LinkedIn profiles, which require a logged-in session to read; all four below were read on 2026-07-29.

Leah Wang — Chief Executive Officer, self-described on the profile headline as "Founder". The profile lists two positions only and 20 connections.

• Aug 2023 – Nov 2025: Strategic Product Manager, ByteDance (listed region: Asia).
• Jan 2026 – present: Chief Executive Officer, MachinePulse, listed as "Self-employed", region North America.

Nanqun Chen — Co-Founder and COO.

• Jul 2013 – Mar 2014: Software Engineer, IBM (DevOps SaaS), Ningbo.
• Mar 2014 – Dec 2015: Product Manager, Ningbo Smarter Logistics Technology, described on the profile as the IBM Smarter Logistics Lab; SaaS platforms for chemical and cold-chain logistics.
• Jan 2016 – Aug 2017: Senior Product Manager, Shanghai Node Supply Chain Management (NodeSCM), owning a TMS/WMS platform.
• Aug 2017 – Dec 2020: Co-founder and Product Manager, Xiaobei Culture Technology (Shanghai), for the Heychat social app.
• Dec 2020 – Aug 2022: Senior Product Manager, Silot.ai, Shanghai; product owner for Kaya, a C2C e-commerce app in the Indonesian market.
• Oct 2022 – Feb 2024: Senior Product Manager, ByteDance, Shanghai.
• Apr 2024 – present: Lead Product Manager, StepFun (阶跃星辰), Shanghai. The profile still shows this as current alongside the MachinePulse role — see Notes.
• Dec 2025 – present: Co-Founder, MachinePulse, Singapore.

Lucas Wu — Founding Member; profile headline "Building proactive AI @MachinePulse, ex-Tencent, Duke Fuqua". Education listed: Duke University Fuqua School of Business.

• 2019–2021: internships at BCG, Tencent (smart retail strategy), AWS (project management), and Skyview Fund; Feb – May 2021, Monetization Product Intern at TikTok, Beijing, working on the self-serve ads platform's risk control.
• Oct 2021 – Feb 2023: Rotational Product Manager, Tencent (腾讯产培项目), Shenzhen.
• Mar 2023 – Sep 2025: Investment Manager, Skyview Fund (天善资本), Beijing; early-stage AI software/hardware and smart manufacturing.
• Sep 2025 – Dec 2025: Senior Investment Manager, Z.ai (智谱AI) Z Fund, Beijing.
• Dec 2025 – present: Founding Member, MachinePulse, Singapore.
• Jun 2020 – present: founder of a non-profit, SEA社会创新俱乐部.

Stated team origins

Four descriptions of the team's background exist, none of them naming anyone, and they do not agree on which company the founders came from:

The two leadership profiles that list prior employers both show ByteDance: Leah Wang as Strategic Product Manager to November 2025, Nanqun Chen as Senior Product Manager to February 2024.

Funding

No funding round has been announced by the company, by any investor, or in any media report found (searched 2026-07-29).

The funding statement appears twice, both times in the company's own recruitment copy. The careers page (Undated; accessed 2026-07-29) describes MachinePulse as a "global AI startup" that is "backed by top-tier USD funds, valued at nearly $100 million". The Senior Manager, Commercial Operations description (created 2026-05-10) repeats it as "a global AI startup backed by top-tier USD funds, with a valuation approaching $100 million" and, under what the company offers, "Backed by premier USD funds with a valuation approaching $100M and meaningful equity upside".

A third statement, differing in kind, is on the LinkedIn company About page (accessed 2026-07-29): "We have secured continued backing from top-tier investors, with tens of millions of dollars in funding." The recruitment copy asserts a valuation; this one asserts an amount raised. The two are not inconsistent, but no source states both together, and neither is attached to a round or a date.

No investor is named anywhere. Nothing corroborates any of the three statements: no Crunchbase or Tracxn entry exists for the Singapore entity, and no press release, investor portfolio page, or news article mentioning a MachinePulse round was found. The Commercial Operations posting asks for candidates with "startup experience or time at an early-stage company (Series A or earlier)", which describes the candidate's background rather than the company's own stage.

Engineering

Technology stack and platforms

The following come from the job descriptions (accessed 2026-07-29) and are hiring evidence, not confirmed production use. A required language supports an inference; an item listed only as a bonus qualification does not.

Two facts follow from this that other sources did not establish. The company runs an in-house LLM post-training effort — the ML Algorithm Engineer role covers alignment and distillation to transfer reasoning and preference behaviour from large models into smaller ones for "intent recognition, personalized response generation, and digital persona" — so MachinePulse is not purely a consumer of third-party model APIs. And it is building a native iOS client, which the product pages do not mention.

No model provider or cloud provider is named for Karpo in any product-facing source. Neither Karpo nor MachinePulse publishes a security page, subprocessor list, or data-retention policy; app.karpo.ai/terms and app.karpo.ai/privacy both returned HTTP 404 when fetched on 2026-07-29, although the Karpo landing page links to Terms of Use and a Privacy Notice.

Systems

Technical background sought

From the job descriptions (accessed 2026-07-29), the prior problem experience candidates are expected to bring:

• Backend (Go / Python, senior): production concurrency and performance tuning; consistency guarantees, caching strategy, rate limiting and graceful degradation; canary releases, rollback, service-metric interpretation and capacity planning. Bonus: production AI applications, retrieval and ranking evaluation.
• Backend (Go, Agent): designing complex business systems and trading off reliability, performance, cost and delivery speed; tool integration, access control, task-state management, exception handling and phased releases. Bonus: workflow engines, task platforms, incident management.
• Infrastructure (SRE): 3–5 years in infrastructure or operations; Kubernetes deployment, management and scheduling; traffic scheduling and network governance; IaC adoption. Bonus: cloud architect certification, service mesh rollout, open-source contributions.
• ML (post-training): master's or above; Transformer and GPT-style architectures; hands-on post-training and alignment; transferring large-model capability into small models and shipping them. Bonus: contributions to LLaMA, Qwen, InternLM, Mistral, vLLM or alignment toolchains; publications; algorithm-competition background (AMC, ICPC, NOI, IOI).
• Product and content roles: repeatedly require hands-on LLM project work — the Agent Content posting excludes candidates whose experience is "merely 'using ChatGPT' as a casual tool" — plus cross-cultural fluency in Western (primarily NYC/LA) or Japanese/Korean lifestyles.

Working conditions

The careers site loads its listings client-side from https://join.machinepulse.ai/api/jobs; the server-rendered HTML contains only the application form, so the roles are invisible to tools that do not execute JavaScript. As of 2026-07-29 the API returned 20 roles, all marked active: 12 full-time and 8 internships, across Research & Development (8), Product & Growth (10), Administration (1), and one with no department set. Creation timestamps cluster on 2026-01-29 (15 roles), with later additions on 2026-01-30, 2026-02-04, 2026-03-01, 2026-05-10, and 2026-07-25.

Notes

Not publicly disclosed

Search scope for the findings below (2026-07-29): machinepulse.ai and every link on it; join.machinepulse.ai rendered in a browser plus its /api/jobs endpoint and all 20 role records; world2agent.ai including the SensorHub; app.karpo.ai including its full sitemap, FAQ, about, how-it-works, and buzz pages; the GitHub organisation via the REST API, its six repositories, and its members page; the world2agent README and architecture doc; the Shotwright README; searches in English and Chinese for "MachinePulse", "MachinePulse Pte", "Karpo", "Karpo AI", and "World2Agent"; the LinkedIn company page, its About and Jobs tabs, and the three leadership profiles including their full experience pages, all read in a signed-in browser session; Crunchbase, Tracxn, and GetLatka; uspto.report trademark listings; and searches for a Karpo App Store listing.

• No founder or executive is named on any surface the company controls — site, careers page, product pages, repositories, press releases. The names in Founder come from individual LinkedIn profiles, which are unreadable without a signed-in session. No team page exists on any property.
• No funding round, investor, valuation date, or database entry corroborating the company's three self-reported funding statements was found.
• No office address, registration number, or ACRA record was retrieved. The Singapore jurisdiction is inferred from the "Pte. Ltd." suffix, not verified against the register; a BizFile entity search was not performed.
• No revenue model is documented for any product.
• app.karpo.ai/terms and app.karpo.ai/privacy returned HTTP 404 despite being linked from the landing page. No security page, subprocessor list, data-retention statement, or certification is published for either Karpo or MachinePulse.
• No model provider is named. The cloud is narrowed only to "AWS, GCP, or Azure" by the SRE posting, which does not say which one is in use.
• No salary band is published for any of the 20 roles, and no visa, benefits, or turnover information was found.
• No named individual is attached to any job posting, department, or reporting line; the postings refer to "the founding team" without naming it.
• No coverage in mainstream technology media was found — the only press located is a single 2026-07-28 release syndicated across openPR and a network of aggregator sites, plus one Chinese blog post on World2Agent.
• The GitHub organisation has no public members, so individual contributors cannot be identified from it.
• Neither Leah Wang's nor Nanqun Chen's profile lists an education entry, and no profile states a founding date for the company.
• No independent coverage of any named founder was found. Searches on 2026-07-29 for "Leah Wang" + MachinePulse, "Nanqun Chen" / 陈南群 + StepFun and + MachinePulse, "Nanqun Chen" + Silot/Kaya, Heychat + 小贝文化科技, and MachinePulse/Karpo + 创始人 / founder / interview / podcast, in English and Chinese, returned no interview, profile, or news article about any of them. Chinese coverage of ByteDance alumni founding AI startups in 2026 does not mention MachinePulse. The only quoted employee in any press material is the Head of Growth, in the single 2026-07-28 release.

Inconsistencies across sources

• Which MachinePulse: Crunchbase, Tracxn, and GetLatka return an unrelated Mumbai industrial-IoT company for the query "MachinePulse". Their founder, revenue, headcount, and funding-status fields do not describe the Singapore entity.
• Where the founders came from: the LinkedIn company page says TikTok, Amazon, PayPal and Keeta; a founding member's post says "ex-TikTok product leaders"; his role description says "former executives from top AI labs"; the job postings say ByteDance. TikTok and ByteDance are the same group, but "top AI labs" is a different claim, and no source names an individual.
• Nanqun Chen's current employment: his profile lists Lead Product Manager at StepFun as running from April 2024 to the present at the same time as Co-Founder at MachinePulse from December 2025 to the present (accessed 2026-07-29). Whether one entry is simply not closed out is not determinable from the profile.
• Founding date: the three leadership profiles date their MachinePulse roles to December 2025 and January 2026, and the GitHub organisation was created 2025-11-11; no source states when the company itself was founded or incorporated.
• Country and centre of operations: a third-party social post describes MachinePulse as "US-based"; the legal entity is a Singapore Pte. Ltd. and the GitHub organisation lists Singapore; and 18 of 20 open roles are located in Shanghai (jobs API). Three sources, three different countries — none of them wrong on its own terms, but the hiring data is the only one that indicates where the work is actually done.
• Karpo platform: the 2026-07-28 release says Karpo is "available on App and iMessage", but a company comparison page states the opposite — "Karpo does not have its own app icon. It is an iMessage extension" — and the FAQ and how-it-works pages describe only the iMessage path. No App Store listing was found. An iOS Development Intern posting covering Swift, App Store submission and TestFlight distribution indicates a native client is under development. On the weight of the company's own product pages, there is no app today; the press release overstates it.
• Karpo capabilities: the how-it-works page presents ticket booking, travel booking, and "life admin" in aspirational phrasing, while the press release presents integrated booking through four named partners as shipped.

Other

• The three products share almost nothing: a consumer lifestyle assistant, an agent-infrastructure protocol, and a video-production agent. The only common thread stated by the company is "proactive" agents (site, careers page).
• Karpo's public web surface is overwhelmingly programmatic: 5,520 of 5,847 sitemap URLs are /scenarios/ pages, many pegged to news events and celebrity names, with timestamps clustered on 2026-07-18 (sitemap).
• The 2026-07-28 release was distributed through openPR and republished verbatim across a large set of near-identical local-news aggregator domains. It is one release, not multiple independent reports.
• A third-party social post describes Karpo offering to sponsor users' outings up to $300 per person if it finds their plan interesting. No company-published source for this campaign was found.
• All World2Agent code is Apache 2.0 and Shotwright is MIT; the protocol, SDK, plugins, example sensors, and registry CLI are all published openly.
• The careers listings are the densest public source on this company by a wide margin — they establish the operating location, the stack, the existence of an in-house post-training team and an unreleased iOS client, and the commercial direction, none of which appears on any product or press surface. They are also invisible without JavaScript, since the page renders them from /api/jobs client-side.
• Hiring is weighted toward go-to-market: 10 of 20 roles are in Product & Growth, most of them overseas social media, influencer marketing, paid media, and growth, against 8 in Research & Development (jobs API).
• A second hiring track exists on LinkedIn that does not appear in the careers-site API: a founding member has posted New York on-site roles for Partnership Development Manager, Social Media & Community Operations, and Community & Events Operations (Lucas Wu, LinkedIn; accessed 2026-07-29). The /api/jobs feed lists only one New York role.
• Karpo is described by a founding member as "one of the fastest-growing applications on iMessage" (LinkedIn); this is a company claim with no supporting figure.
• The company runs on third-party messaging infrastructure it does not control: Karpo's entire delivery channel depends on Linq and, beneath it, on Apple's iMessage.

Resources

Official

• MachinePulse — corporate site
• Careers · jobs API — the 20 role records the page renders from
• LinkedIn
• X — @MachinePulse_AI
• Karpo
• Karpo home
• About us
• How it works
• FAQ
• Buzz
• Sitemap
• X — @Karpo_AI · Instagram
• World2Agent
• world2agent.ai · SensorHub
• GitHub — world2agent · README · architecture doc
• GitHub — notify-hub
• Discord
• GitHub organisation · members page
• GitHub — Shotwright

Press releases

• Karpo crosses half a million personalized recommendations in under 80 days — 2026-07-28 · syndicated copy with full text

Third-party coverage and profiles

• 80aj.com — World2Agent write-up, 2026-04-29 (ZH)
• Threads — third-party post on the Karpo sponsorship campaign
• LinkedIn profiles (require a signed-in session): Leah Wang, Nanqun Chen, Lucas Wu · experience pages: Nanqun Chen, Lucas Wu
• Linq — messaging infrastructure behind Karpo on iMessage · community page quoting MachinePulse
• USPTO trademark listings under Machinepulse Pte. Ltd.: KARPO 99653628, KARPO 99653232, K 99653634, MACHINEPULSE 99653745

Profiles of the unrelated MachinePulse (India) — listed to prevent misattribution

• Crunchbase
• Tracxn
• GetLatka