Julia Computing is pleased to announce seed funding of $4.6M from investors General Catalyst and Founder Collective.

Julia Computing CEO Viral Shah says, “We selected General Catalyst and Founder Collective as our initial investors because of their success backing entrepreneurs with business models based on open source software. This investment helps us accelerate product development and continue delivering outstanding support to our customers, while the entire Julia community benefits from Julia Computing’s contributions to the Julia open source programming language.”

The General Catalyst team was led by Donald Fischer, who was an early product manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the Founder Collective team was led by David Frankel.

Julia is the fastest modern high performance open source computing language for data, analytics, algorithmic trading, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Julia, a product of the open source community, MIT CSAIL and MIT Mathematics, combines the functionality and ease of use of Python, R, Matlab, SAS and Stata with the speed of C++ and Java. Julia delivers dramatic improvements in simplicity, speed, capacity and productivity. Julia provides parallel computing capabilities out of the box and unlimited scalability with minimal effort. With more than 1 million downloads and +161% annual growth, Julia is one of the top 10 programming languages developed on GitHub and adoption is growing rapidly in finance, insurance, energy, robotics, genomics, aerospace and many other fields.

According to Tim Thornham, Director of Financial Solutions Modeling at Aviva, Britain’s second-largest insurer, “Solvency II compliant models in Julia are 1,000x faster than Algorithmics, use 93% fewer lines of code and took one-tenth the time to implement.”

Julia users, partners and employers hiring Julia programmers in 2017 include Amazon, Apple, BlackRock, Capital One, Comcast, Disney, Facebook, Ford, Google, Grindr, IBM, Intel, KPMG, Microsoft, NASA, Oracle, PwC, Raytheon and Uber.

1. Julia is lightning fast. Julia provides speed improvements up to 1,000x for insurance model estimation, 225x for parallel supercomputing image analysis and 11x for macroeconomic modeling.
2. Julia is easy to learn. Julia’s flexible syntax is familiar and comfortable for users of Python, R and Matlab.
3. Julia integrates well with existing code and platforms. Users of Python, R, Matlab and other languages can easily integrate their existing code into Julia.
4. Elegant code. Julia was built from the ground up for mathematical, scientific and statistical computing, and has advanced libraries that make coding simple and fast, and dramatically reduce the number of lines of code required – in some cases, by 90% or more.
5. Julia solves the two language problem. Because Julia combines the ease of use and familiar syntax of Python, R and Matlab with the speed of C, C++ or Java, programmers no longer need to estimate models in one language and reproduce them in a faster production language. This saves time and reduces error and cost.

Julia Computing was founded in 2015 by the creators of the open source Julia language to develop products and provide support for businesses and researchers who use Julia. Julia Computing’s founders are Viral Shah, Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Keno Fischer and Deepak Vinchhi.