Bessemer Venture Partners has led a $10 million pilot round for Julius AI, a startup that identifies itself as an AI data analyst.
In addition to several high-profile angel investors, such as Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson, the round was also attended by Horizon VC, 8VC, Y Combinator, and the AI Grant accelerator.
After graduating from Y Combinator in 2022, founder Rahul Sonwalkar founded Julius, which represented a departure from the logistics venture he had been developing during the accelerator program.
Julius is intended to function as a data scientist by analyzing and visualizing extensive datasets, and subsequently performing predictive modeling from natural language queries.
Julius has established its own market despite possessing functionality that is comparable to that of ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini.
The company reported that it generates over 10 million visualizations and has over two million consumers.
In a previous interview with TechCrunch, Rahul Sonwalkar, the founder of Julius AI, stated that the most straightforward method of utilizing the system is to converse with it.
“You can converse with the AI in the same manner as you would with an analyst on your team, and the AI will execute the code and perform the analysis on your behalf, much like a human.”
Questions that Julius can address and present in a chart include: “Can you illustrate the correlation between revenue and net income for various industries in China and the United States?”
Last year, Harvard Business School (HBS) professor Iavor Bojinov was also impressed by Julius’ expertise in data science.
Bojinov was so impressed that he requested that Sonwalkar customize Julius for the new mandatory course, Data Science and AI for Leaders, at Harvard Business School.
“We were advised that we would not be successful,” Sonwalkar stated in reference to the development of a product that incorporates features that are available from the foundational model companies. “We discovered that it is crucial to concentrate on a specific use case.”
Sonwalkar also orchestrated a viral hoax during his time at YC. Reporters encountered two men with crates outside of the company’s headquarters the morning following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X).
Sonwalkar, one of the two individuals, identified himself as “Rahul Ligma,” a Twitter engineer who had been recently terminated.
Nevertheless, Somwalkar maintains that his venture is significantly more noteworthy than the publicity it garnered as a result of the ruse.
In an earlier interview with TechCrunch, he stated, “I don’t believe that many people recognize me for that anymore.” “I am now receiving a greater amount of recognition for Julius.”
