Graph Database Company Neo4j’s $80m Funding Supports AI Ambitions

Graph database company Neo4j, whose technology was used in the Panama Papers investigations, has just completed an $80 million funding round led by One Park Partners and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital.

The Series E funding brings the total raised so far to $160 million, the largest cumulative investment into a graph database company, according to Neoj4. Secondary involvement in the latest roundOpens a new window came from existing investors Creandum, Eight Roads and Greenbridge Partners.

Neo4j’s technology began as an open source project in Sweden in 2007, and individuals are still able to download the basic product for free, but a growing enterprise product is now available to business clients.

With bases now established in both Sweden and Silicon Valley, the company counts UBS, Walmart, eBay, Volvo, Adobe and AstraZeneca among its more than 300 clients.

According to Emil Eifrem, chief executive and co-founder, Neo4j is the world’s most widely deployed graph database, in use by over 75% of the Fortune 100Opens a new window . It counts 20 of the top 25 banks globally and seven of the 10 biggest retailers on its books, and its technology has been used by banks to tackle fraud and money laundering.

Graph Data Applications Grow Steadily

Graph databases can be used to show the relationships between people in a group, with one common usage example being the social graph that charts contacts on a networking site like Facebook.

Another is the purchase graph on online retailers like Amazon that show products you might like to buy based on your purchase history or similar products chosen by others.

In the 2016 investigations by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists into the Panama Papers, journalists used Neo4j’s technologyOpens a new window to sift through the huge amounts of information. The Panama Papers are a series of leaked financial documents that documented the widespread use of tax havens by the world’s wealthy.

Diagrams and charts helped to make sense of 2.6 terabytes of data, illustrating the links between people and offshore entities that were used to veil funds. The technology was instrumental again in examining the Paradise Papers that were leaked in 2017, and the company asserts that links to these investigations led to an increase in enterprise clients for the paid-for graph database software.

“Connected data is an imperative for large organizations, and graph technology is on every enterprise shopping list,” said Eifrem via the company website. “Businesses that don’t have a graph-powered solution are looking to get one, and those that already use graph technology are developing their second, third or fourth(!) application. Adoption is exploding and far past ‘going mainstream.’”

“I’m immensely proud of what Neo4j has achieved” said Eifrem. “We have taken graph databases from an idea to a product and now to a platform that serves mission-critical needs at the world’s leading banks, telcos, retailers, technology companies, auto manufacturers and logistics brands.”

Neo4j Funding Confirms Market Listing Nod, AI Expansion

The latest funding will help Neo4j continue to serve its customers with graph-powered business applications, as well as increase investment in the flagship graph platform to move into new areas, including graph-enabled artificial intelligence and machine learning systems.

AI and graph technology have a symbiotic relationship that can strengthen and accelerate each other, claims Eifrem,

“On the near horizon, I believe we’ll see the majority of machine learning shift from analyzing individual rows of data to also analyzing graphs of connected data,” wrote Eifrem. “That shift will result in more accurate predictions and thus better decisions.”

A report from advisory firm Forrester Research notes that the company continues to dominate the graph database market. “Neo4j released version 1.0 of the open source Neo4j property graph database in 2010 and since then has continued to deliver innovation and expand the product to support broader use cases.”

With its Series E funding now complete, observers suggest a market listing might not be far away.

The successful funding also feeds into the narrative of growing tech sector interest in open source, a segment that has been having something of a moment lately. Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for code-sharing platform GitHub earlier this year and just over a week ago, IBM announced its biggest-ever purchase of open source pioneer Red Hat for $34 billion.