General Catalyst, Founder Collective fund the creators of open source programming language – Boston Business Journal

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Julia Computing makes it easier for organizations to use the open source programming more

Screenshot of Julia Computing website

The creators of the programming language Julia, several of whom have connections to MIT and Harvard, have raised $4.6 million from General Catalyst and Founder Collective for a startup that aims to commercialize the open source code, a type of business that is becoming more common in the Boston area.

Julia Computing builds professional software tools to make it easier for organizations, especially in the finance world, to make use of the Julia language, which is particularly good for in-demand tasks like data analytics and machine learning. Asset manager BlackRock and large British insurer Aviva are both Julia Computing customers, for example.

Julia Computing makes it easier for organizations to use the open source programming more

Screenshot of Julia Computing website

Alan Edelman, a math professor at MIT, helped start Julia Computing in 2015, along with a number of other computer science researchers affiliated with MIT and Harvard. The team is led by CEO Viral Shah and chief operating officer Deepak Vinchhi, who are both based in India, according to their LinkedIn profiles. The co-founders were all early creators Julia.

We selected General Catalyst and Founder Collective as our principal investors because of their successful track records in the technology sector and our shared commitment to open source," Shah said in a statement. "This investment helps us accelerate product development and continue delivering outstanding support to our customers and users."

Donald Fischer, the lead investor from General Catalyst, was an early employee at Red Hat Inc., a pioneer of commercializing open source software. Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) went public in 1999 and brought in more than $2 billion in revenue in fiscal 2016. The company has been growing its presence in Greater Boston in recent years and soon will be opening a 45,000 square foot office at 300 A St. in the city's Fort Point neighborhood.

Other local startups founded to commercialize open source software include Acquia, RapidMiner, Mautic and R Studio, also a General Catalyst investment. Black Duck Software in Burlington helps companies securely manage their use of various open source languages, and Boston-based DataRobot used open source algorithms to automate some data science tasks.

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General Catalyst, Founder Collective fund the creators of open source programming language - Boston Business Journal