The morning after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two males with containers exterior the corporate’s headquarters. One launched himself as not too long ago 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 worker proper after that cryptocurrency trade 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 means of Y Combinator at the moment engaged on a logistics startup that he later scrapped before 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 might make information science very accessible to everybody,” Sonwalker advised TechCrunch.
Whereas a few of Julius’ performance can also be obtainable on ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, Iavor Bojinov, an assistant professor at Harvard Enterprise Faculty, preferred the software a lot that he needed to persuade Sonwalker to switch Julius particularly for HBS’ new required course referred to as Data Science and AI for Leaders.
“We had accomplished a head-to-head comparability throughout quite a lot of platforms, together with ChatGPT and Julius ended up performing the perfect,” Bojinov advised TechCrunch.
The adoption by HBS, an academic establishment that breeds about 1,000 future business leaders annually, is clearly a giant win for Julius, which is presently a workforce of 12 workers.
Sonwalker has additionally raised a seed spherical led by Bessemer Enterprise Associate’s Talia Goldberg, TechCrunch discovered from somebody accustomed to the deal. However Sonwalker wouldn’t talk about the main points.
Bessemer didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Did Sonwalker’s “Rahul Ligma” stunts open doorways when he was first constructing Julius?
“Just a little bit within the early days, however to be sincere, not as a lot not too long ago,” he mentioned.