{"id":105013,"date":"2025-05-16T01:38:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-16T01:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/105013\/"},"modified":"2025-05-16T01:38:08","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T01:38:08","slug":"fake-fired-twitter-worker-rahul-ligma-is-a-real-engineer-with-an-ai-data-startup-used-by-harvard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/105013\/","title":{"rendered":"Fake fired Twitter worker \u2018Rahul Ligma\u2019 is a real engineer with an AI data startup used by Harvard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The morning after Elon Musk\u2019s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two men with boxes outside the company\u2019s headquarters. One introduced himself as recently laid-off Twitter engineer \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/10\/28\/23428775\/twitter-fake-employee-layoff-rahul-ligma-elon-musk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Rahul Ligma<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">His real name is Rahul Sonwalkar but the prank went viral. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While he never worked for X, he is actually very much a techy. Sonwalker spent several years working as an engineer at Uber.\u00a0He\u00a0even went through Y Combinator at that time, working on a logistics startup that he later scrapped <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ycombinator.com\/companies\/julius\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">before pivoting<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The now 27-year-old wants to draw attention to his more serious endeavor: Julius, the AI data analyst startup he founded about two years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The tool, which can analyze and visualize extensive datasets and perform predictive modeling from natural language prompts, has attracted over 2 million registered users.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI wanted to build something that would make data science very accessible to everyone,\u201d Sonwalkar told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While some of Julius\u2019 functionality is also available on ChatGPT, Anthropic\u2019s Claude, and Google\u2019s Gemini, Iavor Bojinov, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School (HBS), liked the tool so much that he had to convince Sonwalkar to modify Julius specifically for HBS\u2019 new required course called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hbs.edu\/news\/articles\/Pages\/mba-ai-course.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Data Science and AI for Leaders<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u00a0\u201cWe had done a head-to-head comparison across a number of platforms, including ChatGPT, and Julius ended up performing the best,\u201d Bojinov told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The adoption by HBS, an educational institution that breeds about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hbs.edu\/mba\/admissions\/class-profile\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">1,000 future business leaders annually<\/a>, is clearly a big win for Julius, which is currently a team of 12 employees.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sonwalkar has also raised a seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners\u2019 Talia Goldberg, TechCrunch learned from someone familiar with the deal. But Sonwalkar wouldn\u2019t discuss the details.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Bessemer didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Did Sonwalkar\u2019s \u201cRahul Ligma\u201d stunts open doors when he was first building Julius?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u00a0\u201cA little bit in the early days, but to be honest, not as much recently,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The morning after Elon Musk\u2019s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two men with boxes outside&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":105014,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,48256,48257,2915,48258,53,1470,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-105013","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-bessemer-venture-partners","11":"tag-data-science-tools","12":"tag-exclusive","13":"tag-harvard-business-school","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-twitter","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114514959065208086","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}