AI Data Analyst Startup Julius Nabs $10 Million Seed Round

Julius AI, a startup that describes itself as an AI data analyst, announced it has risen $10 million seed round Leading by Bessemer Venture Partners.

Horizon VC, 8VC, Y Combinator and AI Grant Accelerator participated in the round alongside several well-known angel investors, including Prplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson.

Founder Rahul Sonwalkar, after graduating from Y Combinator in 2022, launched Julius and pivoted away from the logistics startup he was building during the Accelerator program.

Julius is designed to act like a data scientist by analyzing and visualizing a wide range of data sets and performing predictive modeling from natural language prompts. Despite having similar features to those found in Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Julius carves its own niche. The company said it has over 2 million users and generates visualizations for over 10 million people.

“The easiest way to use Julius is to talk to it,” Rahul Sonwalkar, founder of Julius AI, told TechCrunch in a previous interview. “You can talk to AI like you’re talking to a team analyst. AI runs code and does analysis like a human.”

A question that Julius can answer on the charts is, “Can you visualize how revenue and net profits correlate from various industries in China and the US?”

Julius’ specialization in data science caught the eye of Professor Iavor Bojinov of Harvard Business School (HBS) last year. Bozhnov was very impressed. He asked Sonwalker to modify Julius specifically to the new required course on HBS. Data Science and AI for Leaders.

“People said you’re not going to be successful,” Sonwalkar said of building products that resemble features available from the basic model companies. “What we found was that focusing on the use case is really important.”

While passing YC, Sonwalkar masterminded a viral prank. The morning after Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X), the reporter met two men holding boxes outside the company headquarters. One of the two men was Sonwalkar. He introduced himself as a recently laid-off Twitter engineer.I’m satisfied with rigma. ”

Despite gaining some infamy from the stunts, Somwalkar claims his startup is more remarkable.

“I don’t think a lot of people know me anymore,” he told TechCrunch in a previous interview. “It’s more recognized now for Julius.”