Anand J | TNN | Feb 12, 2016, 05.05 PM IST
The youngest founder at Julia Computing is just 21. He is still in college, contributing to the Bengaluru-based company's open source programming language during his spare time.
That's Keno Fischer. The German citizen is doing his masters in Physics from Harvard University. He was a prolific contributor to the language for three years preceding his status as co-founder of Julia Computing.
"We are a meritocratic company. Our oldest member is 52 (Alan Edelman, a professor of applied mathematics and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Our biggest contributor now is a higher secondary student," says founding partner of Julia Computing, Viral B Shah.
The other founders are Stefan Karpinski, Jeff Bezanson, Edelman, and Deepak Vinchhi, who work across various locations in Cambridge (MIT, Boston, US), California and Bengaluru. Shah is the common connection. The six founders met for the first time last year at the annual JuliaCon event held at MIT.
Shah started it as a side project in 2009. Since then, the language has become very popular. It got a huge boost when a blog post uploaded on their website on February 14, 2012, went viral. Today, the number of contributors to the language stands at 500. And the language is being used by 150,000 programmers.
The software is given free while the company makes money from services and consultancy. "You need a new modern day language to process the huge data that is aggregated as part of internet-of-things and the cloud," says Shah.
Several Fortune 500 companies, as also the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the New York Fed, and Blackrock Capital are among the many that have used the language. It is being used across sectors — financial services, 3D printing, semiconductors. It has entered the classrooms of several computer science colleges around the world.
"We incorporated the venture in December 2013 when a New York-based hedge fund approached us to support them in the use of the language," says Shah, who holds a doctorate in computer science from University of California. After college, Shah worked as a senior scientist at Interactive Supercomputing, a company that was acquired by Microsoft. The latter killed the intellectual property that Shah had created at Interactive Supercomputing. That pushed Shah to focus on open source.
"With open source, you can keep on building and expanding the horizon of what the software can do," says Shah, pointing out that even Microsoft programs are now being open sourced. Shah has also co-created Circuitscape, a free, open-source program which helps to predict patterns of movement, gene flow, and genetic differentiation among plant and animal populations in heterogeneous landscapes. It was used to map India's tiger population.
The Mumbai-born, 36-year old Shah says he has not made much money, despite his qualifications. But he also adds that since he was from an upper middle class family, there wasn't too much pressure and he had the freedom to experiment. He worked for three years on a meagre salary with the Aadhaar programme, attracted by its potential to bring financial inclusion. "By late 2012, Aadhaar was on autopilot. So I took up Julia full time," he says.
