Rahul Ligma, once a viral Twitter hoax, is now leading an AI data startup used by Harvard, proving truth can outgrow internet parody
Reporters encountered two individuals with boxes outside the company’s headquarters the morning following Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X). One individual identified himself as “Rahul Ligma,” a Twitter engineer who had been recently terminated.
His genuine identity is Rahul Sonwalkar; however, the prank became widely known.
He is genuinely a techie, even though he worked for X. Uber employed Sonwalker for an extended period as an engineer. He even participated in Y Combinator during that period, working on a logistics venture he ultimately abandoned before pivoting.
The 27-year-old established Julius, an AI data analyst venture, approximately two years ago. He is now seeking to attract attention to his more serious endeavor.
The tool has garnered more than 2 million registered users and is capable of analyzing and visualizing extensive datasets and performing predictive modeling from natural language prompts.
Sonwalkar told TechCrunch:
“I wanted to build something that would make data science very accessible to everyone,”
Iavor Bojinov, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School (HBS), was so impressed with Julius that he had to persuade Sonwalkar to modify it specifically for HBS’ new required course, Data Science and AI for Leaders, even though some of Julius’ functionality is also available on ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini.
Bojinov told TechCrunch:
“We had done a head-to-head comparison across a number of platforms, including ChatGPT, and Julius ended up performing the best,”
Julius, a team of 12 employees, is undoubtedly pleased with the adoption by HBS, an educational institution that annually cultivates approximately 1,000 future business leaders.
Additionally, TechCrunch has been informed by an acquaintance with the transaction that Sonwalkar has raised a venture round led by Talia Goldberg of Bessemer Venture Partners. However, Sonwalkar declined to elaborate on the specifics.
Bessemer did not respond to a request for comment.
Did Sonwalkar’s “Rahul Ligma” stunts open doors when he first constructed Julius?
“A little bit in the early days, but to be honest, not as much recently,” he said.