Julius AI, a groundbreaking startup launched by Nikhil Sonwalkar has reached a huge milestone. It worked—they ended up raising $10 million in a seed funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The company, which considers itself to be the world’s first AI data analyst, wants to change the way businesses analyze and visualize their data. Since then Sonwalkar graduated from Y Combinator in 2022, he’s launched Julius AI. It has since grown to over two million users, producing over 10 million visualizations.
Sonwalkar originally set out to do something else while at Y Combinator, building a logistics startup. He saw an opportunity to build an AI tool that could serve as a virtual data scientist. So, he turned in a different direction and founded Julius AI. By making complex queries to large datasets and running predictive modeling with natural language prompts, Julius AI makes data science easy.
The funding round included participation from notable investors such as Horizon VC, 8VC, Y Combinator, and the AI Grant accelerator. Also participating were a number of prominent angel investors. This incredible roster features the likes of Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, and Twilio cofounder Jeff Lawson.
Sonwalkar certainly made a splash in the media while at Y Combinator. He executed one of the most viral pranks of all-time by impersonating a recently-fired Twitter engineer. Reflecting on that experience, he remarked, “I don’t think many people know me for that anymore.”
In an effort to further enhance its capabilities, Harvard Business School (HBS) professor Iavor Bojinov recognized Julius AI’s specialization in data science. He took his vision to Sonwalkar with a simple request. Beyond this, he wanted to expand and adapt the platform for HBS’ exciting new course, Data Science and AI for Leaders.
As Julius AI looks to expand its reach, the company’s founder is hopeful about what lies ahead. He stated, “People told us you’re not going to succeed.” This determination is very much evident in Julius’ intimidatingly user-friendly design. Sonwalkar explained, “The easiest way to use Julius is to just talk to it,” emphasizing how users can interact with the AI as they would with a human analyst.
“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,” he added.