Julius AI, a startup that calls itself "AI Data Analyst," recently announced that it has successfully completed a $10 million seed round of funding, led by the renowned venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners. This round of financing attracted many well-known investors, including Horizon VC, 8VC, Y Combinator, AI Grant accelerator, and several prominent angel investors such as Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, and Jeff Lawson, co-founder of Twilio.
Julius AI was founded by its founder Rahul Sonwalkar in 2022 after graduating from Y Combinator. During his time at the accelerator, Sonwalkar founded a logistics startup but eventually abandoned it and focused entirely on developing Julius AI.
Julius AI aims to analyze and visualize large data sets and perform predictive modeling based on natural language prompts, just like data scientists. Although its functions are similar to those of foundational model companies such as ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini, Julius AI has successfully carved out its own market. The company revealed that it currently has over 2 million users and has generated more than 10 million visualizations.
Rahul Sonwalkar said in an interview with TechCrunch: "The simplest way to use Julius is to talk to it. You can talk to the AI like you would talk to a team analyst, and then the AI will run code and analyze for you just like a human." For example, Julius can answer and present in the form of charts questions like, "Can you see the relationship between the revenue and net income of different industries in China and the United States intuitively?"
Last year, Julius's professional capabilities in the field of data science even caught the attention of Professor Iavor Bojinov from Harvard Business School (HBS). Bojinov was impressed by Julius and invited Sonwalkar to specifically modify its design to suit the new required course at Harvard Business School - "Data Science and Artificial Intelligence for Leaders."
Sonwalkar mentioned that when developing a product with functionality similar to that of foundational model companies, some people doubted its potential for success. He responded, "We found that focusing on use cases was very important."