Rahul Sonwalkar

Rahul Sonwalkar is founder and CEO of Julius AI, a conversational data analyst for spreadsheets and files. He came to the United States from India for college, bounced through big-tech engineering and a failed logistics startup, and landed on a product that lets non-engineers ask questions of their own data in plain language.

From UT Dallas to Uber pricing

He moved to the U.S. at 18 for a computer-science degree at the University of Texas at Dallas, after watching The Social Network and teaching himself how startups and code worked. In college he built Waterview, a developer tool that reached about 17,000 users, scraped Hacker News hiring posts for internship leads, and interned at Facebook on misinformation work before joining Uber full time on rider pricing. He has said the classroom felt less useful than weekend hackathons for meeting people who wanted to ship products.

The trucking pivot into Julius

After leaving Uber in 2022 he entered Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch with a truck-tracking idea: aggregate electronic logging-device data so shippers could see freight the way riders see an Uber. Brokers wanted the map; many drivers would not share live location, and the company stalled. He then tried English-to-SQL over large datasets, found models better at Python than SQL, and in 2023 launched Julius as an AI data scientist that writes and runs analysis code for uploaded sheets. Early growth came through ChatGPT plugins that funneled users onto Julius's own interface before OpenAI tightened the plugin store.

Giving models a computer

Julius sits on a simple job: upload structured or semi-structured data, ask in English, get charts, forecasts, and written answers without standing up a notebook. In a Chroma interview he put the product thesis plainly: "There's a lot of people out there who could use the power of code, but just don't know how to write code or how to run it, so Julius helps them do that." On the same conversation he described the feedback loop that makes code different from essays: break a task into chunks, "progressively write some code, then execute it, see the output and decide whether this is the direction you want." In a Cerebral Valley writeup he added the grounding rule: "it's hard to lie in code, and that's what's really powerful."

On immigrant drive and shipping weekly

In a Lighthouse conversation he framed the company's ambition as replacing the wait for Excel and Tableau expertise: "Our ambition is pretty big. We want to build something that replaces tools like Excel and Tableau." On immigrant founders he said: "One of the special things about immigrants is they feel like they have to earn their place in the tech world and society. And that brings a special level of drive out of them." He has kept Julius small and product-led, talking to paying users directly (including giving his number on a high-tier plan) and shipping weekly so classrooms and ordinary office sheet work see a live product.