Pulse: Vienna Startup Wants to Bring Couples Closer Through Health Data
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When an Apple Watch registers that its wearer slept badly, that information usually stays inside a health app. The Vienna startup Knightify FlexCo wants to turn it into something else: a short note to your partner, written in everyday language rather than in metrics. The app behind that idea is called Pulse, and it has recently moved to the centre of the young company’s attention.
What Pulse Does With Wearable Data
Pulse reads data from Apple Health, including sleep, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, movement and recovery. Out of those values it builds a brief, humanly phrased hint that users can choose to share. Anyone without a wearable can do a manual mood check-in instead. Cycle awareness is available as an option, and alongside the Apple Watch there is a WHOOP integration.
Asked what health data is doing in a relationship app at all, founder Amirali Khoshneviszadeh told Trending Topics: “They help Pulse recognise the right moment for a small personal nudge. Not as numbers, not as a diagnosis and not as surveillance, but as a little help in being there for each other.”
Chat, Wishlist, Photo Album: The App Around It
Around that core the team has built a set of shared spaces: an end-to-end encrypted chat, small gestures such as digital hugs, a joint wishlist, daily questions for couples and a shared photo album. On the Apple Watch there are eight compact views plus a complication for the watch face.
The Raw Data Stays on the iPhone
Privacy is built into the architecture, according to Khoshneviszadeh. “The raw data from Apple Health, such as heart rate, HRV, sleep or steps, never leaves the iPhone. The interpretation happens directly on the device,” the founder says. “Only then does a small, understandable hint emerge, which users can share with their partner themselves.”
Chat messages and shared memories are synced in encrypted form through private iCloud infrastructure. “We cannot read that content,” Khoshneviszadeh says. “We store no health data and no personal chat content on our own servers. For technical functions such as push notifications and certain real-time signals, there are only a few necessary technical data points.”
Free Now, Freemium Later, Advertising Never
That same line is meant to carry over into the business model. Pulse is free at the moment, with a freemium or subscription model including premium features planned for the longer term. “What matters to us is that we build in no advertising and sell none of our users’ personal data,” the founder says. “Pulse should be paid for by the people who use it, and not by advertisers.”
Couples as the Audience, Europe as the First Market
The app addresses couples “who want to be closer to each other in everyday life and support each other, without that turning into surveillance or control,” as Khoshneviszadeh puts it. The product page singles out long-distance relationships. Pulse runs on the iPhone from iOS 17 and on the Apple Watch from Series 6, and it is available in English, German, Russian, Persian and Arabic. “Our first focus is Europe, and in the long run we want to develop Pulse internationally,” the founder says.
A Small Team in Vienna
Pulse is being developed by a small founding team inside Knightify FlexCo. “We are currently a small, hands-on team and take care of product, technology and further development ourselves,” Khoshneviszadeh says about the current setup. Professional founder photos, by the company’s own account, do not exist yet.
Oura Could Follow the Apple Watch
As next steps the startup names user feedback, further product development and broader wearable support. “Besides the Apple Watch we are also looking at other wearables and platforms. Oura, for example, is one of the possibilities we are considering for the future,” the founder says.
“A Place Where a Relationship Gets Its Own Space”
The longer-term ambition reaches beyond a wellness app. “In the long run we want to develop Pulse into a private space of its own for a relationship,” Khoshneviszadeh says. His reasoning: “Smartphones, social media and messengers have made communication incredibly easy. At the same time, there are now a great many things constantly competing for our attention. We want to create a place where a relationship gets its own space and its own attention.”
In practice that means date plans, shared wishlists, memories, small gestures, daily questions and further shared areas all living in one place. “The idea behind it is quite simple: everything that matters to a relationship should get its own place, without advertising, social media feeds or other digital distractions,” the founder says. Health and wearable data, in that picture, are only one part of the whole.
Pulse Is Not the Company’s Only Bet
Part of the wider picture is that Knightify also operates as a development shop alongside its own product. On the company website it positions itself as a “pre-traction software studio” building focused MVPs. The offering ranges from a rapid MVP package meant to reach launch within six to eight weeks, through bespoke web and mobile applications for established companies, to business automation with internal tools, integrations and AI workflows, plus ongoing support on a retainer basis.
From Doctor Briefings to Cleaning CRM
The portfolio is correspondingly broad. It includes Continuum (AI-generated briefs for doctor visits), ClosOn (AI wardrobe styling), Envera (software for endodontic practices), Fuchsia (a dating community with verified identities), TaxDesk (a workflow tool for accounting firms), Cleanify (a white-label CRM for cleaning companies), Tradify (trading signals) and Knightify Guard (GDPR-compliant analytics). The collaboration models vary just as much, from co-founder partnerships and white-label builds to equity-for-build arrangements and design partnerships with pilot discounts.
Pulse is therefore the most visible of the projects being worked on in Vienna, and one of several.31
