The morning after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two males with containers exterior the corporate’s headquarters. One launched himself as just lately laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.”
His actual title is Rahul Sonwalkar however the prank went viral.
Whereas he by no means labored for X, he’s truly very a lot a techy. Sonwalker spent a number of years working as an engineer at Uber. He even went via Y Combinator at the moment, engaged on a logistics startup that he later scrapped earlier than pivoting.
The now 27-year-old needs to attract consideration to his extra critical endeavor: Julius, the AI information analyst startup he based about two years in the past.
The instrument, which may analyze and visualize in depth datasets and carry out predictive modeling from pure language prompts, has attracted over 2 million registered customers.
“I needed to construct one thing that may make information science very accessible to everybody,” Sonwalkar informed TechCrunch.
Whereas a few of Julius’ performance can be out there on ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, Iavor Bojinov, an assistant professor at Harvard Enterprise Faculty (HBS), favored the instrument a lot that he needed to persuade Sonwalkar to switch Julius particularly for HBS’ new required course referred to as Information Science and AI for Leaders.
“We had executed a head-to-head comparability throughout numerous platforms, together with ChatGPT, and Julius ended up performing the perfect,” Bojinov informed TechCrunch.
The adoption by HBS, an academic establishment that breeds about 1,000 future enterprise leaders yearly, is clearly a giant win for Julius, which is presently a staff of 12 workers.
Sonwalkar has additionally raised a seed spherical led by Bessemer Enterprise Companions’ Talia Goldberg, TechCrunch realized from somebody conversant in the deal. However Sonwalkar wouldn’t talk about the small print.
Bessemer didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Did Sonwalkar’s “Rahul Ligma” stunts open doorways when he was first constructing Julius?
“Slightly bit within the early days, however to be sincere, not as a lot just lately,” he mentioned.
