On the morning (now X) when Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, a reporter met two men holding boxes outside the company’s headquarters. One introduced himself, similar to Twitter engineer Rahul Ligma, who was recently laid off.
His real name is Rahul Sonwalker, but the pranks have been word of mouth. He accumulated the infamous name for his character when he went to the Bahamas to play a laid-off FTX worker shortly after the cryptocurrency exchange collapsed.
He has never worked for X or FTX, but he is actually a very technician. He worked as an engineer at Uber for several years.
He even had a Y-combinator at that point working on a logistics startup, so he discarded it before pivoting later.
The now 27-year-old wants to pay attention to his more serious efforts. Julius is an AI data analyst startup founded about two years ago.
The tool attracted over 2 million registered users by being able to analyze and visualize large datasets and perform predictive modeling from natural language prompts.
“We wanted to build something that makes data science extremely accessible for everyone,” Sonwalker told TechCrunch.
Some of Julius’s features are also available in ChatGpt, but Iavor Bojinov, an assistant professor at Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Harvard Business School, had to really like the tool as they had to convince them to specially modify Julius for new required courses in HBS and new required courses in HBS called AI in Leaders.
“We ended up doing our best on many platforms, including ChatGpt and Julius,” Bojinov told TechCrunch.
Recruitment by HBS, an educational institution that breeds around 1,000 future business leaders each year, is clearly a big win for Julius, a team of 12 employees now.
Sonwalker also gathered seed rounds led by Bessemer Venture Partner Talia Goldberg. However, Sonwalker did not discuss the details.
Bessemer did not respond to requests for comment.
Did Sonwalker’s “Rahul Ligma” stunt the door that opened when he was building Julius first?
“It was a bit early on, but to be honest, it wasn’t recently,” he said.