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JULIA Computing Inc: A new company that makes a specialised programming language used for things like making machine learning algorithms and simulating space missions, announced today that it has raised $24 million in funding.
The round was led by Dorilton Ventures. Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, and HighSage Ventures all joined the venture capital firm. As part of the funding round, Bob Muglia, who used to run the big data warehouse company Snowflake Inc., will join Julia Computing’s board.
“Digital models are used to create the wonders of the modern world,” Muglia said in a statement. “Advanced technologies are made with the help of digital modelling.” Some examples are the circuits in our smartphones, new materials, drugs, and aeroplanes. Even though these changes are great, the tools and systems that support them are decades old and can’t fully take advantage of the cloud.
Julia Computing says that it has a more modern replacement for these old tools and systems.
Julia is a programming language that was made by the company’s co-founders while they were at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Julia is used by more than 10,000 organisations around the world, including Google, Microsoft, Intel, and other tech giants, as well as NASA, according to the startup. The programming language is good for a lot of different kinds of software projects, but it is most often used to make artificial intelligence algorithms and scientific applications.
The reason Julia is so popular is that it solves a major technical problem that other languages have.
Most of the time, programming languages are described by whether they are high-level or low-level. High-level languages are easier to learn and let you do things with fewer lines of code, but they are slower than low-level languages. Python, which is used for most data science projects in the business world, is an example of a high-level language.
On the other hand, low-level languages have more complicated syntax and make it possible to do calculations much faster. That’s because all software code made by developers has to be turned into something called “machine code” so that a computer’s processor can understand it. Software written in low-level languages is easier to turn into machine code than software written in high-level languages. This makes computations go faster overall. Also, developers now have more ways to improve their code and get rid of inefficiencies.
Software teams that are making an application for AI or science usually use both a high-level language and a low-level language. To speed up prototyping, developers write the first version of an app in a high-level language that is easy to use. Then, when they have a working prototype of their software, they rewrite everything in a low-level language to make it run faster.
Developers can skip this step with Julia. It has a simple syntax that is similar to that of high-level languages, which makes it easy to make quick prototypes. But at the same time, it has many ways to improve performance that are found in low-level languages. Because of this, software projects can be finished without having to rewrite code from one language to another, which takes a lot of time.
The language is sold by Julia Computing, which has a paid service called JuliaHub that lets developers write Julia code in a browser-based editor. The service also helps with putting code into use. Once a project is ready, developers can use the JuliaHub interface to set up cloud infrastructure for their programmes.
The service gives access to a number of specialised scientific applications for projects that are especially difficult. One of them is a homegrown simulation tool that Julia Computing says can use AI to speed up the process of making simulations by up to 500 times. A pharmaceutical modelling tool called Pumas is also used by the startup.
Julia Computing says it will use the new $24 million funding round to add more features to JuliaHub. The startup is working on a number of projects, including a plan to add more scientific apps like Pumas to the service.
“Data scientists and engineers use things that were made a long time ago. Viral Shah, CEO of Julia Computing and co-creator of the Julia language, said, “JuliaHub makes it possible to design new drugs and therapies, make new batteries, simulate a space mission, map out the universe, and do all of these things while using less computing power and reducing data centre emissions.” ” Now that we have more money, we can grow our team and use Julia’s superpowers in more industries and applications.
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