What happened
Report Provider: TechCrunch
Author: Marina Temkin
Publication Date: July 28, 2025 (as indicated by the article's content and URL structure, though the publishedAt field is July 29, 2025)
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, 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 two million users and generates more than 10 million visualizations.“The easiest way to use Julius is to just talk to it,” Julius AI founder Rahul 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. Techcrunch eventSan Francisco|October 27-29, 2025“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 of 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, Somwalkar 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.”Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch.
Prior to joining TechCrunch, she wrote about VC for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned a CFA charterholder designation.View Bio
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Report Provider: TechCrunch
Author: Marina Temkin
Deeper analysis
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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, 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 two million users and generates more than 10 million visualizations.“The easiest way to use Julius is to just talk to it,” Julius AI founder Rahul 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. Techcrunch eventSan Francisco|October 27-29, 2025“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 of 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, Somwalkar 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.”Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch.
Prior to joining TechCrunch, she wrote about VC for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned a CFA charterholder designation.View Bio
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