I probably shouldn’t be this ecxited, but I am. Swedish Neo Technology, developer of Neo4j, an open source graph database, has secured $2.5 million in seed funding to boost Neo4j’s presence in the emerging NonSQL movement market space.
I just received a happy call from Emil Eifrem, CEO Neo Technology, at the moment in US to talk about semantic web, NonSQL movement and the next step in Neo Technology’s life.
Last time I met with Emil and Peter Neubauer, COO Neo Technology, was earlier this summer after couple of unsuccessful investment rounds. This time the investment round was co-led by Sunstone Capital and Conor Venture Partners. Sunstone Capital has also recently invested in Prezi, online presentation tool I’ve written about here, and is hereby adding another innovative product in their portfolio. The funds will be used to accelerate product development of Neo4j and expand sales by establishing a strong US presence. Because it’s in the US their target customers are at the moment. Emil and his team of six are ready to head to the West Coast and take upon other open source database competitors like AllegroGraph and a document database MongoDB, today backed up by Union Square Ventures. Maybe even dare Cassandra of Facebook?
Eric Ries, the man behind Lean Startup methodology will be joining the company as advisor and among board of directors you will find Nikolaj Nyholm, serial entrepreneur and CEO of Polar Rose.
With the social real-time web, databases as technology maybe finally reaching their coolness and getting the recognition they deserve. Being a former database guru myself, I’ve lived through the years when databases were seen only as the necessary evil.
I will defenitely get back to you on both the future of databases and Neo Technology, but until then I highly recommend this excellent article by Martin Kleppmann. It gives you a great overview of different database models and an excellent check list whether you’re heading towards trouble with your relational database. I personally sign under every single piece of advice.
