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Neo4j raises $325M series F

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Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#21

Post by dgb23 »

handrous wrote: post #3
mkr-hn wrote: post #2

It's always interesting to hear about huge funding rounds for companies I've never heard of. Even more so when they apparently work with a bunch of companies I have heard of.

They're a fairly major graph database product with a well-funded sales team that has been hammering the "I mean, doesn't everything look kinda like a graph? Isn't your data kinda a graph? You should definitely use us as your database-of-record, or for literally anything else you might use a database for, look how fast we are at graph stuff!" line hard and (apparently) with great success.

I’ve used it in production roughly 5+ years ago. Both graph data modeling and cypher queries are very fun to work with. It’s both dynamic and powerful but still gives you a decent amount of structure and ACID guarantees.

One thing that is much easier to model and query, or rather more natural and simple, is authorization and other granular questions you might have about how users and data is connected.

A thing that I can’t wrap my head around however is temporal data modeling with graphs. Haven’t seen or thought of anything too satisfying yet, that meshes well with how I think about graphs. Whereas in SQL it is more explored and clear to me.

I agree that their marketing is very aggressive, but this tech has quite some merit.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#22

Post by Grimm1 »

The_rationalist wrote: post #18
Grimm1 wrote: post #12

What this tells me is that the graph db space has a lot of room in it for someone to come along and make a kick ass product, because honestly every time I've had a problem a graph db can solve I remember I basically only have a few mediocre choices to choose from. Neo4J has been very meh in my experience, but they are the biggest.

What make you consider Tinkerpop mediocre?

Honestly I never heard of it, I had a few in mind but that wasn't one. I'll give it a try next time I need a graph db maybe it can scratch my itch so to speak.

My concerns basically range around memory consumption, query language and language ecosystem.

Edit: Oh and I guess around like functional extensibility. The last time I used a graph DB I had to export from the db itself to HDFS and use Spark to do things like PageRank and I'd rather be able to write that natively in their query lang or some like UDF equivalent.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#23

Post by latenightcoding »

whalesalad wrote: post #19
caturopath wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having some department at e.g. Volvo using your product doesn't mean that you have Volvo as a serious customer paying you like they would as a serious customer. I take your point that this is a really late round of funding, but this doesn't mean they've caught on like they want to yet.

I agree that what you've described is likely the true situation. It just looks funny to see a company claim to be worth $2 billion dollars and namedrop big brands and yet require a 6th cash injection. There is an incongruence there.

But that's how most big tech companies have been operating for the last 10-15(?) years.

How do you think public companies that have never made a $ got there.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#24

Post by tgtweak »

I always find it amusing how much graphQL there is without actual graph db behind it.

Seems the concept of having fluid relationships is appealing for querying but not structuring/storing... which seems like a disconnect.

I have only seen a few Neo4J systems in serious production workloads and they were ALL on logistics... I'm not sure that it's being positioned (or interpreted) as a nice simple solution to start out on.

Edit: I just checked out neo4j "bloom", and it's definitely a good way to make graph more accessible - they should continue to build further on it.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#25

Post by nisa »

handrous wrote: post #14
oauea wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it's fast, but also consumes a ridiculous amount of memory. Tried loading a smallish dataset into neo4j that runs on a 100mb ram postgres server just fine. Neo4j wanted gigabytes of memory.

When I used it, it was fast at a very specific set of graph traversal operations . It was extremely easy to step outside those narrow patterns, while doing things that seemed like they should be fine and were very common sorts of things one might want to do with the DB, at which point performance would become terrible. A look at the underlying data structures they use was revealing re: why they were so fast at some t…

only looked through papers but this didn't look good for them (but maybe an older version - paper is from 2015): https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... - that's why apache age is really interesting or will be maybe one day.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#26

Post by dalbasal »

latenightcoding wrote: post #23
whalesalad wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that what you've described is likely the true situation. It just looks funny to see a company claim to be worth $2 billion dollars and namedrop big brands and yet require a 6th cash injection. There is an incongruence there.

But that's how most big tech companies have been operating for the last 10-15(?) years. How do you think public companies that have never made a $ got there.

True. Private funding rounds this big just weren't available, so these were IPOs instead of round FS.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#27

Post by jrsj »

Series F isn’t an inherently bad thing. That just means that they’ve been around for awhile, want funding to accelerate growth, and don’t want to go public. Every company doesn’t have to grow super fast after 1-2 massive funding rounds and then get acquired.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#28

Post by jexp »

Grimm1 wrote: post #22
The_rationalist wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What make you consider Tinkerpop mediocre?

Honestly I never heard of it, I had a few in mind but that wasn't one. I'll give it a try next time I need a graph db maybe it can scratch my itch so to speak. My concerns basically range around memory consumption, query language and language ecosystem. Edit: Oh and I guess around like functional extensibility. The last time I used a graph DB I had to export from the db itself to HDFS and use Spark to do things like…

That's what you can do in Neo pretty easily. The DS library offers a bunch (50+) algorithms to run on the graph data directly or projected, e.g. PR on 117M wikipedia links runs in 20s.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#29

Post by httpz »

whalesalad wrote: post #5

> Series F Yikes > largest investment in a private database company I guess this is one of those PR moves that is trying to make something lame sound good? If your customer portfolio includes Walmart, Volvo and AstraZeneca why are you raising money a 6th time?

Series F by itself isn't necessarily a bad thing anymore. Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Snowflake all had Series F rounds at one point.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#30

Post by jexp »

tgtweak wrote: post #24

I always find it amusing how much graphQL there is without actual graph db behind it. Seems the concept of having fluid relationships is appealing for querying but not structuring/storing... which seems like a disconnect. I have only seen a few Neo4J systems in serious production workloads and they were ALL on logistics... I'm not sure that it's being positioned (or interpreted) as a nice simple solution to start out…

Not sure if you saw our graphql integration, that takes typedefs and converts a graphql query into a single cypher query, which can then be executed directly. https://neo4j.com/product/graphql-library/ has links to docs and api scaffolding tools.

When I started back then in 2016 with it, it was pretty cool how directly graphql mapped to the graph model in the db.

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