Julius AI is a U.S.-based startup specializing in artificial intelligence-powered data analysis. The company recently raised $10 million in a seed investment round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
Alongside Bessemer, the round included participation from Horizon VC, 8VC, Y Combinator, and AI Grant, as well as several well-known individual investors. Among them are Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity; Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel; and Jeff Lawson, co-founder of Twilio.
The startup’s founder, Rahul Sonwalkar, shifted his focus to Julius AI after completing the Y Combinator program in 2022 and discontinuing a logistics-related project he was previously working on. Julius AI specializes in analyzing large datasets, visualizing data through charts, and generating predictions based on simple, natural language queries.
While similar to AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini, Julius has carved out its own niche and built a strong user base. The company now serves over 2 million users and has created more than 10 million data visualizations.
Sonwalkar explains that using Julius is very simple — you just talk to it like you would to an analyst on your team, and it understands your question, writes the necessary code, and delivers the analysis.
For example, you can ask: “Can you show a graph of the relationship between revenue and net income across different industries in China and the U.S.?”
Julius’s focus on data science also caught the attention of Harvard Business School (HBS). Professor Iavor Bojinov was impressed by the platform’s capabilities and requested that Julius be adapted for a new HBS course titled “Data Science and AI for Leaders.”
One memorable episode involving Sonwalkar happened during the Y Combinator program. After Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X), journalists gathered outside the company’s headquarters to meet “laid-off engineers.” Sonwalkar appeared there and introduced himself as “Rahul Ligma,” a stunt that quickly went viral and sparked wide discussion online. Many initially remembered him for this humorous moment.
However, Sonwalkar’s current reputation is very different. He is now recognized not as a prankster but as a serious and successful startup leader. His project, Julius AI, has achieved significant success in the AI field and serves millions of users. Sonwalkar says that nowadays, people associate him with Julius AI rather than that earlier prank and that means a lot to him.
