Pulse Charter Connect - Seed Round
$2M Raised
There’s an organ ready to save a life, but the plane’s late, the ground crew’s missing, and the system’s running on a spreadsheet built in 2003. Welcome to American transplant logistics, where human organs move slower than your Uber Eats order. And people die for it, sixteen of them, every day.
Laura Epstein saw that chaos firsthand, not as a bystander, but as a licensed pilot with a resume that reads like a NASA case study. FAA systems engineer. Aerospace degree from UVA. Booth MBA. Her final boss battle? Consulting for an air charter company during her MBA and realizing the entire organ transport process was stitched together with plastic and prayers. While hospitals chased down charter pilots by phone, viable organs expired in coolers like forgotten leftovers.
So Laura built Pulse Charter Connect, think “Expedia for organs,” but smarter, faster, and built to save lives instead of earn airline miles. Pulse doesn’t just book a flight. It digitizes the entire transplant journey, from the OR to the jet and back to the ICU. Real-time GPS, automated routing, FAA and HIPAA compliance baked into the stack, and yes, even IoT powered organ containers transmitting temperature, pressure, and humidity mid-flight. All from one sleek SaaS dashboard.
Since launching in April 2024, Pulse Charter Connect has saved 65 lives across 12 states, zero spoilage, zero missed windows. Transplant coordinators have clawed back 11 hours a week from the bureaucratic abyss, while hospitals cut $2.3 million in waste from missed deliveries. Now they’re going national.
That $2 million seed round? Co-led by Ivy Ventures and Simplex Ventures, with Cedars Sinai Health System, Belal Badat, Techstars, and a pack of strategic angels throwing in. And they didn’t just show up with checkbooks, they showed up because Pulse proved it could compress chaos into coordination at scale. Total funding is now $3.3 million. Every dollar tagged for expansion, tech upgrades, and beefing up a ten-person engineering and ops squad ready to stretch coverage from coast to coast.
Behind the data? CTO Chris Tyler, a 30-year vet with time at IBM and AT&T, and now doubling as Chief Analytics Officer for ALS Never Surrender Foundation. He’s got more enterprise SaaS in his DNA than most startups have in their pitch decks. Together, he and Laura are flying Pulse straight into a $3.6B market where 28,000 donor organs still go unused every year.
There’s a phrase in transplant surgery: when a match is found, time is everything. Pulse Charter Connect is making sure time doesn’t kill the gift.
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