Databases run the world, but database products are often some of the most mature and venerable software in the modern tech stack. Designers will pixel push, frontend engineers will add clicks to make it more difficult to drop out of a soporific Zoom call, but few companies are ever willing to rip out their database storage engine. Too much risk, and almost no return.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s exceptional when a new database offering breaks through the barriers and redefines the enterprise.<\/p>\n
Neo4j<\/a>, which offers a graph-centric database and related products, announced today that it raised $325 million at a more than $2 billion valuation in a Series F deal led by Eurazeo, with additional capital from Alphabet\u2019s venture wing GV. Eurazeo managing director Nathalie Kornhoff-Br\u00fcls will join the company\u2019s board of directors.<\/p>\n That funding makes Neo4j among the most well-funded database companies in history, with a collective fundraise haul of more than half a billion dollars. For comparison, MongoDB, which trades on Nasdaq, raised $311 million in total<\/a> (according to Crunchbase) before its IPO. Meanwhile, Cockroach Labs of CockroachDB fame has now raised $355 million in funding<\/a>, including a $160 million round earlier this year<\/a> at a similar $2 billion valuation.<\/p>\n The past decade has seen a whole new crop of next-generation database models, from scale-out SQL to document to key-value stores to time series and on and on and on. What makes graph databases like Neo4j unique is their focus on the connections between individual data entities. Graph-based data models have become central to modern machine learning and artificial intelligence applications, and are now widely used by data analysts in applications as diverse as marketing to fraud detection.<\/p>\n CEO and co-founder Emil Eifrem said that Neo4j, which was founded back in 2007, has hit its growth stride in recent years given the rising popularity of graph-based analysis. \u201cWe have a deep developer community of hundreds of thousands of developers actively building applications with Neo4j in any given month, but we also have a really deep data science community,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In the past, most business analysis was built on relational databases. Yet, inter-connected complexity is creeping in everywhere, and that\u2019s where Eifrem believes Neo4j has a durable edge. As an example, \u201cany company that ships stuff is tapping into this global fine-grain mesh spanning continent to continent,\u201d he suggested. \u201cAll of a sudden the ship captain in the Suez Canal \u2026 falls asleep, and then they block the Suez Canal for a week, and then you\u2019ve got to figure out how will this affect my enterprise, how does that cascade across my entire supply chain.\u201d With a graph model, that analysis is a cinch.<\/p>\n Neo4j says that 800 enterprises are customers and 75% of the Fortune 100 are users of the company\u2019s products.<\/p>\n We last checked in with the company in 2020 when it launched 4.0<\/a>, which offered unlimited scaling. Today, Neo4j comes in a couple of different flavors. It\u2019s a database that can be either self-hosted or purchased as a cloud service offering which it dubs Aura. That\u2019s for the data storage folks. For the data scientists, the company offers Neo4j Graph Data Science Library, a set of comprehensive tools for analyzing graph data. The company offers free (or \u201ccommunity\u201d tiers), affordable starting tiers and full-scale enterprise pricing options depending on needs.<\/p>\n\n