Graph databases made headlines in 2016, with the release of the Panama Papers, and more recently, last month’s Pandora Papers. This technology made two of the largest leaks in history possible. It played a critical role in uncovering the relationships between people and entities in millions of financial and legal records. In doing so, both the technology and the company that developed it, Neo4j, drew the attention of journalists, academics and commercial users, paving the way for a revolution in the use of relational data sets.
Over the years, many large enterprises have taken notice of Neo4j and launched an array of projects leveraging the company’s technology. There are now so many well-tested graph use cases in master data management, fraud analytics, page rank, and customer 360, to name a few, and new ones are continuously being developed.
While Neo4j has become very adept at developing enterprise-grade solutions to meet growing demand, it’s now expanding its focus to offer those solutions to SMBs worldwide.
A Broader Focus, a New Investment
With the traction of Neo4j Aura, the company’s cloud platform as a service, Neo4j is making technology that was once the exclusive domain of large corporate data teams easier to adopt for SMBs and individual developers. By drastically lowering barriers to graph trialling and adoption, Aura empowers SMBs to augment various business applications, giving smaller players the same capabilities that large enterprises have long enjoyed.
That’s one of the reasons why we’re excited to announce our investment in Neo4j, alongside Eurazeo, Google Ventures, and One Peak Partners. Our investment will help the company continue to develop Aura as it looks further to consolidate its position as a decade-long market leader.
We’ve been watching Neo4j for a long time, and we’ve been impressed with the company’s seasoned executive team, led by Emil Eifrem, a founder who pioneered the industry. Together, they are focused on building a consequential business with a global product; this dovetails perfectly with Inovia’s mission of building sustainable global tech companies. By partnering with them and joining their Board of Directors to help with the company’s next growth phase, we’re confident that we can add value and help Neo4j achieve their goal of giving people a better way to work with data.
Global Outlook
Neo4j marks our second investment this year in a company with a strong presence in Europe and North America, underscoring our strategy of helping those businesses scale globally for meaningful growth. We continue to be awed by the depth of engineering capabilities in Europe and remain excited to work with ambitious companies established in the region.