Fake Fired Twitter Worker ‘Rahul Ligma’ is a real engineer with a data startup used by Harvard
In the morning after the acquisition of Elon Musk in 2022 from Twitter (now X), journalists met two men with boxes outside the company’s headquarters. We showed up as the recently dismissed twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma”.
Its real name is Rahul Sonwalkar but the farce has become viral.
Although he has never worked for X, he is actually very technical. Sonwalker has spent several years working as an engineer at Uber. He even went through Combinator at that time, working on a logistics startup that he later abandoned before pivoting.
The 27 -year -old man wants to draw attention to his more serious business: Julius, the IA data analyst startup that he founded about two years ago.
The tool, which can analyze and view detailed data sets and carry out a predictive modeling from natural language prompts, attracted more than 2 million recorded users.
“I wanted to build something that would make data science very accessible to everyone,” Sonwalkar told Techcrunch.
Although some Julius features are also available on Chatgpt, Claude d’Anthropic and Gemini de Google, Iavor Bojinov, assistant professor at the Harvard Business School (HBS), so much liked the tool that he had to convince Sonwalkar to modify Julius specifically for the new required course of HBS, data sciences and II for managers.
“We had made a face to face comparison on a certain number of platforms, including Chatgpt, and Julius ended up doing the best,” Bojinov told Techcrunch.
The adoption by HBS, an educational establishment which generates around 1,000 future business leaders each year, is clearly a great victory for Julius, who is currently a team of 12 employees.
Sonwalkar also raised a seed lap led by Talia Goldberg of Bessemer Venture Partners, someone familiar with the agreement. But Sonwalkar would not discuss details.
Bessemer did not respond to a request for comments.
Has the “Rahul Ligma” of Sonwalkar opened the doors when he was building Julius for the first time?
“A little at first, but to be honest, not as recently,” he said.
