The morning after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two males with packing containers exterior the corporate’s headquarters. One launched himself as lately laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.”
His actual identify is Rahul Sonwalker 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 trade imploded.
While 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 means of 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 critical endeavor: Julius, the AI information analyst startup he based about two years in the past.
The software, which might analyze and visualize intensive datasets and carry out predictive modeling from pure language prompts, has attracted over two million registered customers.
“I wished to construct one thing that may make information science very accessible to everybody,” Sonwalker informed TechCrunch.
While a few of Julius’ performance can also be accessible on ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, Iavor Bojinov, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, favored the software a lot that he needed to persuade Sonwalker to change Julius particularly for HBS’ new required course referred to as Data Science and AI for Leaders.
“We had finished a head-to-head comparability throughout numerous platforms, together with ChatGPT and Julius ended up performing one of the best,” Bojinov informed TechCrunch.
The adoption by HBS, an academic establishment that breeds about 1,000 future enterprise leaders yearly, is clearly an enormous win for Julius, which is at present a workforce of 12 staff.
Sonwalker has additionally raised a seed spherical led by Bessemer Venture Partner’s Talia Goldberg, TechCrunch discovered from somebody acquainted with the deal. But Sonwalker wouldn’t talk about the small print.
Bessemer didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Did Sonwalker’s “Rahul Ligma” stunts open doorways when he was first constructing Julius?
“Somewhat bit within the early days, however to be sincere, not as a lot lately,” he mentioned.
