53 START-UP ALLEY Pulse Labs
COUNTRY: US STARTED: 2017
designers, which integrates an SDK into a skill code and provides analytics and insights to enable developers to apply actionable improvements. It also offers a panel of real people that enable app developers to test with specific demographics in mind. Adjacent to this is a market research unit, which Zwick likens to ‘a Nielsen for voice,’ comprising a panel of users who are monitored so that Pulse Labs can analyse user behaviour and identify trends. Work in this area looks set to scale up thanks to a partnership with data insights and consultancy firm Kantar, which was announced late last year. The firm’s clients include multiplatform marketing agencies, conversational design studios, gaming companies and other third-party outfits designing and
on how real people and different groups interact and respond to voice apps – so they set about building a prototype. Based on this early work, the duo became one of nine start-ups accepted into the inaugural 2017 Alexa Accelerator, which is a Seattle-based programme co-led by Amazon and the investment platform Techstars. “We’d quit our jobs by this point and had moved to Seattle to make this happen and that programme took us from being two guys with a side project to running a full-time company,” explains Zwick. The company has since raised $2.5m seed funding from the Amazon Alexa Fund, Bezos Expeditions, Google Assistant Investments and Madrona Venture Group. Pulse Labs’s offering comprises a testing platform for developers and
developing voice applications for clients such as HBO, BBC, NBC and the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation. Pricing is structured on a per-project basis, although many firms opt for an annual contract so that they can operate a continual testing cadence. More recently, Pulse Labs has seen a surge of custom during the coronavirus pandemic for its remote testing service, which has become popular among larger enterprises that usually perform these kind of tasks in-house. While the majority of Pulse Labs’s focus has been on skills created for home voice assistants, Dwick notes that the ecosystem is rapidly expanding, and in-car voice integrations are soon set to offer
new use cases and commercial opportunities for the start-up.
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