Neo4j set database record with US$325-million fund round

Neo4j has raised $325 million in a Series F funding round led by Eurazeo and attracting participation from GV, formerly Google Ventures, in a transaction described at the largest investment in a private database company.

Existing investors One Peak, Creandum and Greenbridge Partners as well as new entrants DTCP and Lightrock also participated, helping raise Neo4j’s valuation to more than $2 billion.

“Databases constitute the largest single market in enterprise software, with growth centered in new generations of databases that address today’s data challenges in unprecedented ways,” said Emil Eifrem, Neo4j’s CEO and co-founder. 

“This is a magical time in databases, presenting an opportunity for a handful of generational companies to emerge as leaders in the broader landscape,” said Eifrem said. “Neo4j is one of these companies, and today’s record-breaking transaction in the database space demonstrates that our new and existing investors share this belief.”

The California-based company plans to use the investment to accelerate along three primary dimensions — cloud portfolio, graph data science and market reach.

Nathalie Kornhoff-Brüls, a managing director in the growth team of Eurazeo, has been appointed to the Neo4j board of directors. 

“t is clear that businesses who are unable to digitise, analyse, and visualise this interconnectedness will be left behind,” said Kornhoff-Brüls. “We chose to invest in Neo4j because it is shaping the future of how data and analytics will need to be implemented in the enterprise and beyond.”

As the graph category creator, Neo4j has built a global community of hundreds and thousands of highly skilled application developers and data scientists around its technology ecosystem. These practitioners are building wide-ranging applications, unable to be served by relational or other NoSQL databases, which require digitising connections in data at scale. 

Examples include determining the price of an airline ticket in real time, exposing complex criminal networks responsible for cyber attacks, and money laundering activity.