Parsing data
Matías Castillo, MBA/MS ’20, co-founder and CEO of Pulsar, has an optimistic outlook on modern manufacturing and his company’s prospects worldwide. The trick, he says, is focusing on what’s important—and that’s quality data.
“For us, it’s about cutting through the noise and zeroing in on what truly matters: building robust hardware and mastering the capture and analysis of industrial data,” says Castillo, explaining how this is especially true in the rush for artificial intelligence (AI) agents, useful tools but only as accurate as a factory’s runtime metrics. “We want to be the market leader in operational analytics for manufacturers, starting with the productivity of machines.”
Pulsar is helping clients to capture and visualize data from the factory floor, a task that is notoriously hard to do. From the start, Pulsar has been a Silicon Valley startup focused on serving manufacturers worldwide.
The business began on Stanford’s campus and quickly expanded to pilots in Chile and then 10 customers in Mexico, an ideal early market for rapid iteration. In June 2025, the venture expanded into U.S. factories.
One of Pulsar’s metal manufacturing clients describes the utility of seeing machinery with more precision: “The financial benefit is clear. Knowing the reasons behind downtime allows us to address and fix issues quickly, saving money. We handle problems almost in real-time.”
Pulsar’s testimonials are full of notes about “microstops”—one- or two-minute lags in equipment that can substantially affect a bottom line. Said a global producer of corn flour and tortillas: “When added up, it amounts to a lot of lost time. Now with Pulsar, we can measure it accurately.”
Clients can translate these findings into optimizing equipment runtime, saving electricity, and wasting less material.
Taking flight
Cofounders Castillo and COO Juan Cristóbal Ruiz-Tagle are lifelong friends from Santiago, Chile, where they studied mechanical engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Ruiz-Tagle went on to work for LATAM Airlines Group as a project engineer and afterwards founded DSA Technologies to provide data-driven productivity solutions for industrial plants.
At Stanford, Castillo met cofounder and CTO Cristian Bartolomé, MS '19, as they launched a prior startup focused on aiding data scientists with their AI experiments. Pulsar’s founding engineer and director of technology, Varun Srivastava, MS ’21, also came into the picture at Stanford, and in 2020, the four of them joined together and founded Pulsar.
First to invest in the venture was the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy.
“We really appreciate how they were the first to bet on us,” says Castillo, who learned about the Innovation Transfer Grant program during an internship with ClimateAI, a 2017 grant recipient.
Today, Pulsar is a team of 40 employees with clients across North and South America and systems deployed in more than 100 factories.
“Manufacturing has always been a huge industry in the U.S. and the business opportunity stems from how underserved it is,” he says. “Our focus is on providing clients with accurate insights into their operations that they wouldn’t have otherwise.”
This article is part of the TomKat Center Spotlight series designed to highlight the impact and trajectory of the work of faculty and students who received funding through our Innovation Transfer Program, TomKat Solutions, and Graduate Fellowships. Stanford University does not endorse any non-Stanford entities, programs, products, or services listed in the article.
