The morning after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two males with packing containers outdoors the corporate’s headquarters. One launched himself as not too long ago laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.”
His actual identify is Rahul Sonwalkar however the prank went viral. He piled on his character’s notoriety when he went to the Bahamas to play a laid-off FTX employee proper after that cryptocurrency alternate imploded.
Whereas he by no means labored for X or FTX, he’s really very a lot a techy. He 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 desires to attract consideration to his extra severe endeavor: Julius, the AI knowledge analyst startup he based about two years in the past.
The software, which may analyze and visualize intensive datasets and carry out predictive modeling from pure language prompts, has attracted over 2 million registered customers.
“I wished to construct one thing that might make knowledge science very accessible to everybody,” Sonwalkar instructed TechCrunch.
Whereas a few of Julius’ performance can also be out there on ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, Iavor Bojinov, an assistant professor at Harvard Enterprise Faculty (HBS), appreciated the software a lot that he needed to persuade Sonwalkar to switch Julius particularly for HBS’ new required course known as Knowledge Science and AI for Leaders.
“We had carried out a head-to-head comparability throughout quite a few platforms, together with ChatGPT, and Julius ended up performing the perfect,” Bojinov instructed TechCrunch.
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 group of 12 workers.
Sonwalkar has additionally raised a seed spherical led by Bessemer Enterprise Companions’ Talia Goldberg, TechCrunch 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?
“A bit of bit within the early days, however to be sincere, not as a lot not too long ago,” he stated.
