The morning after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two men with boxes outside the company’s headquarters. One introduced himself as recently laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.”
His real name is Rahul Sonwalkar but the prank went viral. He piled on his character’s notoriety when he went to the Bahamas to play a laid-off FTX worker right after that cryptocurrency exchange imploded.
While he never worked for X or FTX, he is actually very much a techy. He spent several years working as an engineer at Uber.
He even went through Y Combinator at that time, working on a logistics startup that he later scrapped before pivoting.
The now 27-year-old wants to draw attention to his more serious endeavor: Julius, the AI data analyst startup he founded about two years ago.
The tool, which can analyze and visualize extensive datasets and perform predictive modeling from natural language prompts, has attracted over 2 million registered users.
“I wanted to build something that would make data science very accessible to everyone,” Sonwalkar told TechCrunch.
While some of Julius’ functionality is also available on ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, Iavor Bojinov, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School (HBS), liked the tool so much that he had to convince Sonwalkar to modify Julius specifically for HBS’ new required course called Data Science and AI for Leaders.
“We had done a head-to-head comparison across a number of platforms, including ChatGPT, and Julius ended up performing the best,” Bojinov told TechCrunch.
The adoption by HBS, an educational institution that breeds about 1,000 future business leaders annually, is clearly a big win for Julius, which is currently a team of 12 employees.
Sonwalkar has also raised a seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners’ Talia Goldberg, TechCrunch learned from someone familiar with the deal. But Sonwalkar wouldn’t discuss the details.
Bessemer didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Did Sonwalkar’s “Rahul Ligma” stunts open doors when he was first building Julius?
“A little bit in the early days, but to be honest, not as much recently,” he said.