Julius AI just raised $10 million in a seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
The round included Horizon VC, 8VC, Y Combinator, AI Grant accelerator, plus big-name angels like Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson.
Founder Rahul Sonwalkar launched Julius after pivoting from a logistics startup during Y Combinator 2022. The AI acts like a data scientist, analyzing, visualizing, and predicting from natural language prompts. Julius already counts over two million users and has created 10 million+ visualizations. 
Sonwalkar told TechCrunch the key is simplicity.
“The easiest way to use Julius is to just talk to it,” Rahul Sonwalkar said.
“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.”
Julius can tackle complex questions, including comparing industry revenue and net income correlations across countries.
Harvard Business School took notice. Professor Iavor Bojinov asked Sonwalkar to customize Julius for HBS’s new required course Data Science and AI for Leaders.
Sonwalkar pushed through skepticism about building a product overlapping with ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini.
“People told us you’re not going to succeed,” Sonwalkar said.
“What we found was that being focused on a use case is really important.”
Sonwalkar also briefly surfaced in tech news for a viral prank posing as a laid-off Twitter engineer the morning Elon Musk took over. But now, he says, the attention is all about Julius.
“I don’t think many people know me for that anymore,” he told TechCrunch.
“I get recognized for Julius a lot more now.”
