Julia Computing, the popular open source computing language for data scientists has announced a seed funding of $4.6M from investors General Catalyst and Founder Collective, both venture capitalist firms, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the US.

The deal was led by Donald Fischer, Venture Partner at General Catalyst who was an early product manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“The Julia team nailed the ‘Free’, we’re thrilled to try to help them market the ‘Mium’,” wrote David Frankel, managing partner at Founder Collective, in a post unpacking the deal, which highlights its popularity among data scientists.

Julia has more than one million downloads, a YoY increase of more than 161%, and is among the top 10 programming languages developed on GitHub, CEO Viral Shah wrote in an email to FactorDaily.

Julia Computing was founded in 2015 by the creators of the open source Julia language — Viral Shah, Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Keno Fischer and Deepak Vinchhi. Its advantages over other languages include speed improvements, unlimited scalability, and easy integration with existing code platforms.

It develops products and provides support for businesses and researchers who use the Julia language. The company operates out of Boston, New York, and Bangalore. At the time of writing, the open source language had more than 37,000 commits, over 500 contributors, and more than 50 releases on Github. Companies hiring Julia programmers range from tech giants, asset managers, insurance companies, and drone manufacturing companies.

The programming language has many potentially life-altering applications, from modelling cancer genomes to self-driving cars, aviation safety, precision medicine, medical diagnosis and performing surgery using augmented reality.

“When we began work on Julia eight years ago, we couldn’t possibly have imagined all the uses to which it is being put today,” Shah said. For data scientists looking to learn this language, he linked us to courseware on EdX, Coursera, and recommended two books — Julia for Data Science by Zacharias Voulgaris, and Julia High Performance by Avik Sengupta.

“The founder’s approach to funding signals quite a bit; they aren’t mindlessly chasing capital, they are prudent decision-makers; they’re confident in their ability to run lean,” wrote Frankel in the post on Medium.

Read: Julia is killing it in the programming world. Meet its co-creator from India

Revenue opportunities include Julia-based products such as JuliaPro for professional users, JuliaFin for traders and others in the finance community, and JuliaRun for those who want to deploy their Julia applications in production. Other revenue streams include consulting services and support, and training, Shah said.

“The founders of Julia Computing are the creators of the Julia language. We are committed to ensuring that Julia remains free and open source, and we have taken the necessary steps to guarantee that it does,” he said.

Updated at 12.48pm on June 21, 2017, to add the Julia video by FactorDaily.

---