Niz

Head gardener at Pulse Local

Most mornings start with a run through the back streets of Tokyo, and most days end at a desk, tending Pulse Local.

This page is the short version of how I got here.

A runner with a shaved head, seen from behind, jogging down a narrow Tokyo residential lane at dawn, past power lines, a vending machine and potted plants, with the Skytree on the horizon.

I started in a research lab.

My PhD is in machine learning, from INRIA in France. The papers from those years have been cited more than a thousand times.

Then came twenty years in financial data, at Thomson Reuters and then Bloomberg. At Bloomberg I led technical account management for enterprise clients across Asia Pacific. Watching that much data travel made me care where it goes.

My publications on Google Scholar

A wooden desk with a clipped stack of research papers, a notebook of hand-drawn curves and diagrams, a fountain pen and a cup of green tea.

From a desk in Tokyo.

Pulse Local is my second company. I build it mostly alone, on top of two years of earlier work on money software.

I believe in local AI and open weights. A privacy policy is a promise, and promises get rewritten. So I chose infrastructure over policy.

Why our mark is a leaf

A window in a small Tokyo apartment at first light, with rooftops and power lines outside, a plant and a cup of tea on the sill, and a notebook of leaf sketches on the desk below.

Rackets, and long runs.

I love racket sports, table tennis most of all, and I played a lot of it at university. I run too. My best half marathon so far is 1 hour 20 minutes.

A table tennis table in a quiet Japanese school gym, a paddle and a white ball resting on it, afternoon light slanting across the wooden floor.

Say hello.

I’m @nizbuilds on X, or you can write to me directly.

Write to me @nizbuilds on X