Neo Technology is the creator of Neo4j, a leading graph database that allows large enterprises and startups to model, store and query both data and its relationships. Formed in 2007 in Malmo, Sweden, the company moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley in 2011 and has then expanded in other countries such as UK, Germany and France. Emil Eifrem, CEO and co-founder, answered our questions about Neo and new Series C round of funding (read here), which brought the total raised to over $42m to date.
FinSMEs: Hi Emil. First, can you tell us a little bit more about you? What’s your background?
Emil: I am the co-founder of Neo4j, which is an open-source project; as well as the CEO of Neo Technology, which is the company behind Neo4j. As the CEO, I set the strategic direction of the company, drive the product strategy and spend a lot of time evangelizing graph databases and Neo4j. I’m an engineer by background. These days, I don’t code, but I do use the product quite extensively from as an end user.
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Neo Technology. Where and when did you start? What’s the opportunity you found in the market?
Emil: When we first started working on Neo4j back in 2000 in Sweden, we didn’t look at the opportunity from an industry perspective, but instead we were trying to solve a very urgent need we had at the time. We were a small team building an enterprise content management system; at the time we called it a media asset management system. It was essentially a big file system on the web, which is what a content management system really is. We were twenty some engineers where half of our development team spent the majority of their time just modeling this big connected dataset into the relational database. We evolved that as an embedded abstraction layer that stored nodes and relationships on the application server. We saw the concept as both revolutionary and powerful and applicable to any scenario where the value of the application depended upon relationships between data elements. This planted the seed for Neo4j – a general purpose graph database – that uses data (nodes) and data relationships (relationships) as building blocks, but is like a relational database in most other aspects, meaning it stores data, supports ACID transactions, has an expressive query language, and is scalable and robust.
In 2007, still in Sweden, we open sourced Neo4j as the first modern graph database and started evangelizing the value of looking at data through the lens of relationships. In 2009 we raised $2.5M in seed funding accelerated product development and open source community building. In 2011, we moved the company’s headquarters to Silicon Valley and started focusing on the commercial side of things. Since then we raised an additional $22M in funding in two $11M rounds (series A & B), leading up to the $20M Series C that we announced today.
FinSMEs: How does Neo Technology work? Tell me something about the features…
Emil: Our product, Neo4j is an enterprise grade graph database, where we use a graph data model to represent, store and query both data and its relationships in a manner that mirrors how people think about data (we call this “whiteboard friendliness”) and the way information is processed by the human brain.
The advantage of this approach is that we can leverage data relationships in realtime to unlock business value. The graph based model also provides the flexibility to continually evolve the application’s domain model as needs change.
Common use cases for Neo4j are (a) Real-Time Recommendation Engines for product, services or content (b) Graph-Based Search (c) Master data management (d) Fraud detection (e) Network and IT Configuration Management (f) Identity and Access Management. We also see IoT as an emerging area for us.
As an enterprise grade database, some of our key features include
1) Native graph storage and query engine
2) Expressive query language
3) Full ACID support for transactions
3) Clustering: horizontal scale-out for performance & high availability
4) Integration APIs and drivers for different languages
5) Built-in ETL to import data
FinSMEs: Where are you in terms of growth?
Emil: As a privately held company, we don’t share our revenue numbers, but there are a number of growth metrics that I can share. At the moment, we are 80 employees spread across our offices in San Mateo (California), Malmö (Sweden), London and Malaysia.
2014 was our strongest year yet, with 2014 activity including a major product release (Neo4j 2.1) driving a record number of product downloads, widespread adoption of Neo4j by a growing global community of developers, the company’s highest number of new customer acquisitions. Annually recurring revenue grew 120 percent year-over-year from 2013. Our release of Neo4j 2.1 added features that make it easy to bring data in from a multitude of data sources, accelerating the adoption of graph databases across a wide range of industry segments. This year, we are proud to count enterprises like Walmart, eBay, Earthlink, UBS, CenturyLink, Pitney Bowes and Cisco, as well as startups like Medium, CrunchBase, Polyvore, Zephyr Health and Elementum, as our customers.
FinSMEs: You just raised funding. What can you tell me about the investors? How are you using the funds?
Emil: We will use the investment to innovate further with our award-winning Neo4j product, drive open source community growth, and expand our U.S. and international footprint in response to increasing demand for graph databases. We had a lot of interest in this round from a number of highly respected investors, and chose Creandum and Dawn Capital for their breadth of experience operating and advising successful technology businesses. Creandum has a great track record with investments in companies like Spotify and we are pleased to have Johan Brenner of Creandum join our board. Johan is a very experienced investor with a depth of experience in this space including investments in MySQL, Mojang and Wrapp. Dawn is a highly respected firm and we believe their investment and operational experience will help us tremendously.
FinSMEs
15/01/2015