The morning after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two males with packing containers outdoors the corporate’s headquarters. One launched himself as not too long ago 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 by means of 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 severe endeavor: Julius, the AI knowledge analyst startup he based about two years in the past.
The device, which may analyze and visualize intensive datasets and carry out predictive modeling from pure language prompts, has attracted over 2 million registered customers.
“I wished to construct one thing that might make knowledge science very accessible to everybody,” Sonwalkar advised TechCrunch.
Whereas a few of Julius’ performance can also be accessible on ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, Iavor Bojinov, an assistant professor at Harvard Enterprise College (HBS), favored the device a lot that he needed to persuade Sonwalkar to change Julius particularly for HBS’ new required course known as Information Science and AI for Leaders.
“We had performed a head-to-head comparability throughout quite a lot of platforms, together with ChatGPT, and Julius ended up performing one of the best,” Bojinov advised TechCrunch.
The adoption by HBS, an academic establishment that breeds about 1,000 future enterprise leaders yearly, is clearly an enormous win for Julius, which is at the moment a workforce of 12 staff.
Sonwalkar has additionally raised a seed spherical led by Bessemer Enterprise Companions’ Talia Goldberg, TechCrunch discovered from somebody conversant in the deal. However Sonwalkar wouldn’t focus on the main points.
Bessemer didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Did Sonwalkar’s “Rahul Ligma” stunts open doorways when he was first constructing Julius?
“A little bit bit within the early days, however to be trustworthy, not as a lot not too long ago,” he stated.
