CulturePulse is a US–Slovak AI 🏷️#company founded in 2021 by Justin Lane. It builds psychologically realistic 📝digital twins of audiences and societies to model belief, motivation, conflict, and behavior. The company is headquartered in Middletown, Delaware, with a team in Bratislava, Slovakia, and runs lean at roughly 13 people.
CulturePulse turns populations into simulatable systems. Its flagship platform, 📝ARES ("Automated Risk Estimation"), constructs digital twins of target populations — the engine behind a roughly 15-million-agent model of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict built for the United Nations, with more than 80 attributes per agent. A second product, 📝Pythia, is a proprietary AI ontology and text-analysis engine spanning 93 psychological and cultural dimensions across 100+ languages, distributed via AWS Marketplace. The company's work has supported the UN alongside academic and government partners studying conflict and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and South Sudan, and its UN Israel–Palestine project was featured in WIRED in 2023.
I started CulturePulse because most "AI for society" work is pattern-matching dressed up as understanding — it tells you what people did, not why. We model the why: belief, motivation, and the conditions under which conflict turns or holds. If a simulation can't help someone make a harder decision more honestly, it isn't worth running.