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Neo4j raises $325M series F

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Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#91

Post by hirako2000 »

staticassertion wrote: post #47
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?

IDK, on the one hand it's a late round. On the other, as a CEO, the ability to just immediately raise 325 million dollars is both impressive and appealing. It's insane how far even one million dollars goes, 325 is mind boggling to me.

325M isn't all that much when the company has been growing for over 10 years, doubling its staff count every 2 years, with a bunch of VPs added in, supposedly to figure out how to run professionally 100 nerds. It leads to 4 layers made of directors, senior managers and managers below each VP. Those jobs take a decent pay, and a significant cash bonus. Significant travel and other expense coming from sales folks who won't take airbnb for a 3 days trip in NY, 5 stars sheraton please. Add to that it's pretty common to spend 1/3 of the yearly flow into marketing, your IT, HR and accounting departments having itself large IT expense (concur, service now, etc) you end up with a boat burning 325M per year quite easily.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#92

Post by jonahss »

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.

Redis has an official graph module called RedisGraph. Check it out.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#93

Post by goodoldneon »

feu wrote: post #36
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.

Do you have any opinions on ArangoDB or Dgraph? My new tech lead is talking about switching from MongoDB to one of those.

We used ArangoDB at my previous job. I liked it, though it was my first engineering job so I didn't get deep into the technicals. I thought it had a nice UI and query language

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#96

Post by motohagiography »

I've done development on an app with Neo as the back end, and what I liked about it was mainly py2neo and the cypher query language. Even after developing in it, approaching another graph in DGraph was conceptually impenetrable, as my impression of dgraph was they had a bunch of unnecessary and poor abstractions in their documentation. The next candidate is the redis graph, but I haven't. With Neo, if you learn cypher, you literally don't need to know anything else about it to be useful in it, which brings me to what I think their real market is.

The opportunity I understood after using Neo was the big product play would be a kind of mental shift for enterprise data analyst users whose jobs exist in excel/powerbi today with power users using Cognos, and less devops/SaaS company/etc. I over-use Apple as an example, but if Apple entered into enterprise data products, Neo would be the kind of thing to be the underlying tech for it, as if you are an apple user, an apple'ey analytics tool would be based on users producing and reasoning about their data with graphs instead of tables, if you could imagine a kind of photoshop for data, or a fundamental conceptual change from spreadsheets to graphs. They aren't as competitive as a data tool, but I think they are unrivaled as a knowledge tool.

The tech is really great, but the product piece appears to have been a challenge because the use cases for graphs have been very enterprise'y, which has limited adoption because people who operate at that higher business logic level of abstraction that graphs enable are not the people picking and adopting new technologies. The growth will come from younger people who learned python in high school, and have a more data centric world view. Maybe that's the play.

Anyway, as a user I can see why they got participation on an F round. Imo, they've solved the what/how/why and have done some amazing science and engineering, and what I hope that money buys them is some magic.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#97

Post by Barrin92 »

xibalba wrote: post #69

According to Crunchbase, Neo4j was founded in 2007! Is this correct? 14 years in and they are still raising VC money!?

and the sheer size of these rounds always astonishes me for very specialized software products. 300 million bucks, that's enough to build a death star, what do they do with all of the cash

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#98

Post by rdevsrex »

tshaddox wrote: post #31
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…

I don’t think that’s particularly amusing or a “disconnect.” From what I can tell, the entire point of GraphQL at Facebook was to expose an interface that looks like a graph database but is in fact able to load data from any number of different underlying data stores (without the query developer needing to know about that part).

To me, the best part about graphql is subscriptions over websockets.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#99

Post by __jem »

clpm4j wrote: post #94
__jem wrote: post #85

Curious what something like Neo4j offers over a something like [this]( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/gr... ) in MSSQL.

Native graph storage and index-free adjacency. No tables, no JOINs.

Okay,that seems more interesting. Any resources on the data structures used to avoid indices? Without table ddl, if node types are arbitrary, that seems like a hard problem to solve in terms of storage layout.

Re: Neo4j raises $325M series F

#100

Post by topspin »

I've been looking at Bitnine AgensGraph and thus also Apache AGE. These are (related) extensions of PostgreSQL that use PostgreSQL to implement a complete graph database and Cypher query language. Interestingly you can even mix SQL and Cypher in the same statement.

This approach of extending PostgreSQL is very appealing to me. There is a great deal of value in the PostgreSQL stack that doesn't need to be reinvented just to deliver a graph database and query language. How much easier is it to adopt graph database techniques when it is simply an extension of database technology nearly everyone is already running? Conceivably one might find some future version of PostgreSQL RDS (and other cloud PostgreSQL services) delivers Cypher.

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