Neo Technology Raises $36M to Boost Graph Database App Tech
Graph database developer Neo Technology announced on November 10 that it has raised a $36 million Series D round of funding, bringing total funding to date for the company up to $80.1 million.
The new round of funding was led by Greenbridge Investment Partners and included the participation of Sunstone, Creandum and Eight Roads Ventures. The new money will be used to help the company to grow its customer base and build partnerships. As well the funding will help Neo Technology to further developer its core neo4j graph database technology.
The neo4j database is an open-source project that hit its 1.0 release back 2010, which is when adoption started to ramp up. In 2011, the Neo Technology, the lead commercial sponsor behind neo4j raised a $10.6 million Series A round of funding to help enable the company's go to market efforts.
The neo4j graph database is very different than a traditional SQL based database and is also differentiated in that it's not a NoSQL database either. In a traditional relational database, data is organized into tables. Doing data searches across multiple tables in a relational database requires a ‘join' operation, which typically is an operation that requires CPU cycles.
“In contrast, with a graph database the only thing you do when you hop from one node to another is just have a direct pointer for access,” Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo, explained in a 2011 interview. “You don't have to traverse an index or do a merge which leads to some amazing performance improvements.”
The most recent release of the product is neo4j3.1 was announced by Neo Technology on October 13 and is set to provide new security and scalability features.
In addition to the open-source community edition, Neo Technology has an enterprise edition that provides advanced monitoring, clustered replications and hot backups among other commercial features that paying customers receive on top of the open-source base.
Neo Technology claims that it now has over 200 customers including big names such as Walmart, eBay and Cisco.
“This new round of funding builds on the tremendous momentum we’re seeing this year around Neo4j – both development-wise and commercially – as connected enterprises look for real-time value from unprecedented volumes of data and graph databases become the enterprise standard,” said Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo Technology and co-creator of Neo4j, said in a statement.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
