Julius AI, a startup that describes itself as an AI knowledge analyst, introduced it has raised a $10 million seed round led by Bessemer Enterprise Companions.
Horizon VC, 8VC, Y Combinator, the AI Grant accelerator participated within the spherical together with a number of high-profile angel traders, 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 throughout the accelerator program.
Julius is designed to behave like an information scientist by analyzing and visualizing intensive datasets after which performing predictive modeling from pure language prompts. Even with performance much like that present in ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, Julius has carved out its personal area of interest. The corporate stated it has greater than two million customers and generates greater than 10 million visualizations.
“The simplest method to make use of Julius is to simply speak to it,” Julius AI founder Rahul Sonwalkar instructed TechCrunch in an earlier interview. “You may speak to the AI such as you would speak to an analyst in your workforce, 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 web revenue correlate for various industries in China versus US?”
Julius’ specialization in knowledge science even caught the attention of Harvard Enterprise College (HBS) professor Iavor Bojinov final yr. Bojinov was so impressed he requested Sonwalkar to switch Julius particularly for HBS’ new required course known as Data Science and AI for Leaders.
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“Folks instructed us you’re not going to succeed,” Sonwalkar stated about constructing a product that’s much like options out there from the foundational mannequin firms. “What we discovered was that being targeted on a use case is absolutely necessary.”
Whereas going by way of YC, Sonwalkar additionally masterminded a viral prank. The morning after Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two males with bins outdoors of 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, Somwalkar 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.”