Julius Ai, a startup that describes himself as an AI data analyst, announced that it has raised a $ 10 million round of $ 10 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
Horizon VC, 8VC, Y Combinator and AI Grant Accelerator participated in the round along with several high-profile angelic investors, including confusing CEO Aravind Srinivas, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and Twilio-Med Founder Jeff Lawson.
Founder Rahul Sonwalkar launched Julius after graduating from Y Combinator in 2022 and turned away from the logistics start he had built under the accelerator program.
Julius is designed to act as a data researcher by analyzing and visualizing extensive data sets and then performing predictable modeling from natural languages PROMPS. Even with functionality similar to the one found in Chatgpt, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, Julius has cut his own niche. The company said it has more than 2 million users and generates more than 10 million visualizations.
“The easiest way to use Julius is just talking to it,” Sonwalkar told TechCrunch in a previous interview. “You can talk to AI, as if you would talk to an analyst on your team, and AI, like a human, would run the code and do the analysis for you.”
Questions that Julius can answer and present in a chart includes: “Can you visualize how revenue and net income correlate for different industries in China against us?”
Julius’ specialization in data sciences even caught the eye of Harvard Business School (HBS) Professor Idaldor Bojinov last year. Bojinov was so impressed that he asked Sonwalkar to change Julius specifically to HBS ‘new required course called Data Science and AI for leaders.
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“People told us you won’t succeed,” Sonwalkar said of building a product similar to features available from the basic modeling companies. “What we found was that it is really important to be focused on a matter of use.”
While walking through YC, Sonwalkar also mastermined a viral prank. The morning after Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X), journalists met two men with boxes outside the company’s headquarters. One of the two men was Sonwalkar, who presented himself as a recently dismissed Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.”
Despite some notoriousness obtained from the stunt, Sonwalkar insists that his startup is much more aware of.
“I don’t think many people know me for it anymore,” he told Techcrunch in a previous interview. “I’m being recognized for Julius much more now.”