Julius AI, a startup that describes itself as an AI information analyst, introduced it has raised a $10 million seed spherical led by Bessemer Enterprise Companions.
Horizon VC, 8VC, Y Combinator, and the AI Grant accelerator participated within the spherical, together with a number of high-profile angel buyers, together with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson, amongst others.
Founder Rahul Sonwalkar launched Julius after graduating from Y Combinator in 2022 and pivoting away from the logistics startup he’d been constructing in the course of the accelerator program.
Julius is designed to behave like a knowledge scientist by analyzing and visualizing in depth datasets after which performing predictive modeling from pure language prompts. Even with performance just like that present in ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, Julius has carved out its personal area of interest. The corporate mentioned it has greater than 2 million customers and generates greater than 10 million visualizations.
“The simplest method to make use of Julius is to simply discuss to it,” Sonwalkar instructed TechCrunch in an earlier interview. “You may discuss to the AI such as you would discuss to an analyst in your group, and the AI, like a human, would go run the code and do the evaluation for you.”
Questions that Julius can reply and current in a chart embody: “Are you able to visualize how income and internet revenue correlate for various industries in China versus US?”
Julius’ specialization in information science even caught the attention of Harvard Enterprise Faculty (HBS) professor Iavor Bojinov final 12 months. Bojinov was so impressed he requested Sonwalkar to change Julius particularly for HBS’ new required course known as Knowledge Science and AI for Leaders.
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“Individuals instructed us you’re not going to succeed,” Sonwalkar mentioned about constructing a product that’s just like options out there from the foundational mannequin firms. “What we discovered was that being centered on a use case is absolutely essential.”
Whereas going via YC, Sonwalkar additionally masterminded a viral prank. The morning after Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two males with bins outdoors the corporate’s headquarters. One of many two males was Sonwalkar, who launched himself as a not too long ago laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.”
Regardless of some notoriety gained from the stunt, Sonwalkar insists that his startup is much more attention-worthy.
“I don’t assume many individuals know me for that anymore,” he instructed TechCrunch in an earlier interview. “I get acknowledged for Julius much more now.”