AI data analyst startup Julius nabs $10M seed round

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

Horizon VC, 8VC, Y Combinator, and the AI Grant accelerator participated in the round, along with several high-profile angel investors, including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson, among others.

Founder Rahul Sonwalkar launched Julius after graduating from Y Combinator in 2022 and pivoting away from the logistics startup he’d been building during the accelerator program.

Julius is designed to act like a data scientist by analyzing and visualizing extensive datasets and then performing predictive modeling from natural language prompts. Even with functionality similar to that found in ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, Julius has carved out its own niche. The company said it has more than 2 million users and generates more than 10 million visualizations.

“The easiest way to use Julius is to just talk to it,” Sonwalkar told TechCrunch in an earlier interview. “You can talk to the AI like you would talk to an analyst on your team, and the AI, like a human, would go run the code and do the analysis for you.”

Questions that Julius can answer and present in a chart include: “Can you visualize how revenue and net income correlate for different industries in China versus US?”

Julius’ specialization in data science even caught the eye of Harvard Business School (HBS) professor Iavor Bojinov last year. Bojinov was so impressed he asked Sonwalkar to modify Julius specifically for HBS’ new required course called Data Science and AI for Leaders.

“People told us you’re not going to succeed,” Sonwalkar said about building a product that’s similar to features available from the foundational model companies.  “What we found was that being focused on a use case is really important.”

While going through YC, Sonwalkar also masterminded a viral prank. The morning after Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two men with boxes outside the company’s headquarters. One of the two men was Sonwalkar, who introduced himself as a recently laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.” 

Despite some notoriety gained from the stunt, Sonwalkar insists that his startup is a lot more attention-worthy.

“I don’t think many people know me for that anymore,” he told TechCrunch in an earlier interview. “I get recognized for Julius a lot more now.”