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Julia Computing Raises $4.6M in Seed Funding

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Re: Julia Computing Raises $4.6M in Seed Funding

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's quite cool. The specification is a literate Julia program and the specification document is built from it. Simultaneously, they run large scale simulations to make sure that the specification behaves as the theory says it should. There was some discussion with them about deployment, and they funded us for a proof of concept Julia-to-C compiler, but the continuation of that discussion is probably still a num…

Having read a little about TLA+ recently, I'm curious about how specifications are written in Julia. (For example, is there model-checking involved?)

There was a talk at JuliaCon 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19zm1Fn0S9M

Slides here: http://juliacon.org/2015/images/juliacon2015_moss_v3.pdf

Re: Julia Computing Raises $4.6M in Seed Funding

#63

I'm not sure I buy the notion of, "Solves the two language problem." There is always going to be some library or environment consideration that makes a unified language for everything impractical (unless your entire business runs on an AS400).

The two language problem is more specific to scientific computing where literally every popular library is written in more then one language - fast C/C++/Fortran and convenient high-level R/Matlab/Python. NumPy, SciPy, Caffe, Theano, Tensorflow to name a few. I once had to rewrite Matlab + C code (for face tracking) to pure Julia - not only the resulting code was almost twice smaller, it also ran ~20% faster.

Re: Julia Computing Raises $4.6M in Seed Funding

#64
post #60

Any suggestions for learning Julia (detailed projects to follow) for fluent pythonistas?

I would recommend David P. Sanders talks at JuliaCon 2015 and 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ1y5NUD_RI&index=3&list=PLP...

http://juliacon.org/2016/workshops.html#invitation

Personally, I enjoyed reading the manual when I learned it. But I realise that it isn't for everyone.

Re: Julia Computing Raises $4.6M in Seed Funding

#65
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://juliacomputing.com/products/ - JuliaPro is the go-to product for anyone who wants to use Julia – professionals, engineers, software developers and data scientists. Beginners and experts can build better software quicker and dramatically improve performance. - JuliaRun is for scalable deployment of Julia in production for real time analytics and large-scale parallel simulations in the public cloud or a private…

Answering the actual question: JuliaPro is basically VisualStudio Express vs. Pro (e.g. there's a free version and then an expensive version with better integrations, better enterprise level tools, etc). JuliaRun is basically a cloud service (e.g. charge for hosting) designed for julia code. JuliaBox seems to be a cloud IDE / google docs / notebook style product. Probably with a similar model to github eventually (e.…

- JuliaPro is free, but the paid version comes with support and integration with Excel and JuliaRun (possibly more features in future).

- JuliaRun is for easily scalable deployment of code, either for cloud or local servers.

- JuliaBox is as you say, available here https://juliabox.com/

- JuliaFin is completely separate, and currently consists of Bloomberg integration and the Miletus contract specification and pricing package.

(I work for Julia Computing)

Re: Julia Computing Raises $4.6M in Seed Funding

#66
post #46

That's an impressive amount of money to raise in Seed funding. Here in the UK this is more like Series A money: a Seed round would probably be around $700K (no authoritative source - purely from knowledge of a few companies raising this kind of money). I do wonder though: have Julia been able to raise this much money thanks to awesome traction or the reputation of the team?

That's A money. They were founded in 2013. They have 11-50 employees. They already have products (read: MVP) and services. That's not proving a hypothesis seed money. That's scaling an enterprise A money. That said, Crunchbase [1] says seed round. But that's A money both by size and apparent intent.

We are self-­funded and have been profitable from day one. [2]

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/julia-computing#/ent...

[2] https://venturebeat.com/2015/05/18/why-the-creators-of-the-j...

Re: Julia Computing Raises $4.6M in Seed Funding

#67
Anyway else think it's interesting that $4.6m could be labeled "seed funding"?

Seed round 2016 average is around $1m per Crunchbase:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/crunchbase-sees-rise-in-av...

Cooley has seed round pre-moneys at $4-6m. (Thus, a $5m check is pretty much out of question at that stage.)

https://www.cooleygo.com/trends/

So, this is much more like a Series A? I wonder if they were advised to call it seed funding to leave open the possibility of a "big" Series A, due to the level of interest. It does seem like SV VCs are making somewhat large bets on F/OSS-based companies, so maybe that is wise.

I also realize a lot of this is semantics.

Re: Julia Computing Raises $4.6M in Seed Funding

#68
post #60

Any suggestions for learning Julia (detailed projects to follow) for fluent pythonistas?

The basic syntax itself will look very familiar to someone coming from python. The immediate obvious differences:

- 1-based indexing instead of 0-based

- end keyword vs significant whitespace blocks (and no colon to start a block)

- function instead of def (or defined inline f(x) = ...)

- x -> ... instead of lambda x : ...

- start:stop/start:step:stop instead range(start,stop)/range(start,stop,step)

- strings are joined with * instead of +

The actual internals, and features such as types and multiple dispatch can make it a very different to use, but hopefully that should be enough to get you started.

Re: Julia Computing Raises $4.6M in Seed Funding

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Answering the actual question: JuliaPro is basically VisualStudio Express vs. Pro (e.g. there's a free version and then an expensive version with better integrations, better enterprise level tools, etc). JuliaRun is basically a cloud service (e.g. charge for hosting) designed for julia code. JuliaBox seems to be a cloud IDE / google docs / notebook style product. Probably with a similar model to github eventually (e.…

- JuliaPro is free, but the paid version comes with support and integration with Excel and JuliaRun (possibly more features in future). - JuliaRun is for easily scalable deployment of code, either for cloud or local servers. - JuliaBox is as you say, available here https://juliabox.com/ - JuliaFin is completely separate, and currently consists of Bloomberg integration and the Miletus contract specification and pricin…

Hey, I'd be interested in knowing if you're just selling plain ol' non-free software. Can I buy the PRO version and give it to my friends, can I study it, can I modify it?

It's a little sad when we are trying to figure out how to make money for free software and the answer ends up being "sell (some) software non-freely". Okay, so it's impossible to make money without selling non-free software? There can only be one Red Hat in the world?

I don't think it's any consolation that you are also producing free software; pretty much every major software vendor nowadays does that while keeping all the interesting secret sauce secret.

Re: Julia Computing Raises $4.6M in Seed Funding

#70
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://juliacomputing.com/products/ - JuliaPro is the go-to product for anyone who wants to use Julia – professionals, engineers, software developers and data scientists. Beginners and experts can build better software quicker and dramatically improve performance. - JuliaRun is for scalable deployment of Julia in production for real time analytics and large-scale parallel simulations in the public cloud or a private…

Answering the actual question: JuliaPro is basically VisualStudio Express vs. Pro (e.g. there's a free version and then an expensive version with better integrations, better enterprise level tools, etc). JuliaRun is basically a cloud service (e.g. charge for hosting) designed for julia code. JuliaBox seems to be a cloud IDE / google docs / notebook style product. Probably with a similar model to github eventually (e.…

JuliaFin actually includes a bunch more stuff on top of JuliaPro/JuliaRun that is finance/banking/insurance specific. We have a really cool library called Miletus - which is a contract specification language based on a paper by simon peyton jones. Also, it will include JuliaDB, Bloomberg connectivity, etc.

So, not more money for the same stuff, but more money for a lot more other stuff. Some of these components are proprietary, but many are open source.

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