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 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 by 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 information analyst startup he based about two years in the past.
The instrument, which might 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 might make information science very accessible to everybody,” Sonwalkar informed iinfoai.
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 College (HBS), preferred the instrument a lot that he needed to persuade Sonwalkar to change Julius particularly for HBS’ new required course referred to as Knowledge Science and AI for Leaders.
“We had finished a head-to-head comparability throughout various platforms, together with ChatGPT, and Julius ended up performing the most effective,” Bojinov informed iinfoai.
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 at the moment a workforce of 12 staff.
Sonwalkar has additionally raised a seed spherical led by Bessemer Enterprise Companions’ Talia Goldberg, iinfoai discovered from somebody conversant in the deal. However Sonwalkar wouldn’t talk about 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?
“Just a little bit within the early days, however to be sincere, not as a lot lately,” he mentioned.
