Graph database company Neo Technology gets $36m funding boost
While businesses might still be coming to terms with the potential of graph databases, the company that has done much to define the market with its Neo4j graph database, Neo Technology, has just got another $36m in new funding.
This latest Series D investment comes from Greenbridge Investment Partners, along with existing investors Sunstone, Creandum, and Eight Roads Ventures. The funding will be used to "build on the tremendous momentum we're seeing this year around Neo4j," said Neo Technology CEO Emil Eifrem.
Neo Technology CEO Eifrem: "We've always aimed to grow [the company] in a little more careful and cash-efficient way."
"As connected enterprises look for real-time value from unprecedented volumes of data, [the] graph database is becoming the enterprise standard for doing this," he said.
Until recently a little known technology, graph databases achieved fame through the Panama Papers revelations which clearly demonstrated how powerful this technology could be to make sense of large amounts of data.
Last month at Neo Technology's GraphConnect conference, organizations as diverse as NASA, Marriott, Cablevisión, Cisco, and Novartis explained how they are using graph databases.
Speaking about this latest cash injection, Eifrem said that the company had its own way of raising the funding.
"The traditional Silicon Valley view is that you should raise as much money as you possibly can, and I fundamentally disagree with that view," he told ZDNet.
"We have been very European, if you will, about how we run our company compared to all the other database companies, some of them raising $150 to $350 [million]," he said. "We've always aimed to grow it in a little more careful and cash-efficient way. We are very focused on how we are spending the money."
So how will the company use the funds?
"We will be spending money on growing sales and marketing, but the biggest investment of this money will be on product," Eifrem said.
It will be used in three "key areas" of the business, he explained. First, on continued research and development of Neo4j to "cement its leading position in the space".
Secondly money will be spent to "expand Neo Technology's footprint in the enterprise sector... with strategic investments in sales and marketing".
And, thirdly, investment will be made in building "deeper partnerships within the graph technology ecosystem to bring a wider range of solutions to existing users and customers", he said.