The morning after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now known as X) in 2022, two men with boxes outside the company’s headquarters caught the attention of reporters. One of them introduced himself as recently laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.”
In reality, his name is Rahul Sonwalkar, and the prank quickly went viral.
The truth is, Sonwalkar never worked at X (Twitter), but he does have significant experience in technology. He spent several years working as an engineer at Uber. During that time, he also participated in the Y Combinator program, where he founded a logistics startup, which he later pivoted away from.
Now 27 years old, Sonwalkar wants to draw attention to his more serious work—the AI-powered data analytics startup Julius, which he founded about two years ago.
The Julius tool can analyze and visualize large datasets and create predictive models from natural language queries. It currently has over 2 million registered users.
“I wanted to make data science accessible to everyone,” Sonwalkar told TechCrunch.
While some of Julius’s functions are similar to those offered by ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, Harvard Business School (HBS) assistant professor Iavor Bojinov liked the tool so much that he convinced Sonwalkar to tailor Julius specifically for HBS’s new course, “Data Science and AI for Leaders.”
“We conducted a head-to-head comparison across several platforms, including ChatGPT, and Julius performed the best,” Bojinov told TechCrunch.
Being adopted by HBS, an institution that educates about 1,000 future business leaders annually, is a major success for the startup. Julius currently has a team of 12 employees.
According to TechCrunch sources, Sonwalkar has also closed a seed funding round led by Talia Goldberg from Bessemer Venture Partners, though he declined to share details.
Bessemer did not respond to requests for comment.
Did Sonwalkar’s “Rahul Ligma” persona help open doors for Julius in its early days?
“It helped a little in the beginning, but not so much recently,” he said.
