Neo4j Closes Banner Year Marked by Customer Successes, Continued Industry Validation, Community Engagement, and Major Funding

As AI Use Cases and Cloud Delivery Supercharge Global Adoption of Neo4j, the Graph Category Leader Surpasses $100 Million in ARR & $2 Billion Valuation; Raises the Largest Funding Round in Database History

Neo4j^®, the world’s leading graph data platform, crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) during 2021. The year was marked by strategic product innovation that drove customer and partner excellence, strong community engagement, and super-sized venture funding investments.

“Neo4j has pioneered the graph space for a number of years, with critical deployments among major credit card firms for fraud detection, as well as use cases in areas driven by the pandemic, including product testing and supply chain analysis,” said Carl Olofson, Research Vice President at IDC.

Neo4j continued to grow in popularity throughout 2021 as the world’s most widely deployed graph database, maintaining its position as a top 20 database overall. Momentum drivers include the accelerated adoption of Neo4j AuraDB™, a fully managed service that reduces friction as complex applications shift to the cloud, as well as the success of Neo4j Graph Data Science, a complete toolset for data scientists to apply graph algorithms for more effective machine learning and better predictions.

Over 1,000 organizations depend on Neo4j for mission-critical applications, and many thousands more experiment, prototype, and deploy Neo4j’s expanding portfolio of cloud services. Notable customers include Pfizer, PepsiCo, Inc., World Health Organization (WHO), Cable News Network, Inc. (CNN), and BMW Group.

Neo4j’s success in helping customers across industries such as Financial Services, Retail, and Healthcare caught the attention of investors, leading to $390 million in new investments raised in 2021, and launching Neo4j to a $2 billion valuation. On top of being the largest single funding round to date in the database space, Neo4j also welcomed GV (formerly Google Ventures) as a strategic investor and added former Google CFO, Patrick Pichette, to its board to offer increased industry expertise for the next phase of growth.

Patrick Pichette, Inovia Capital Partner and Neo4j Board Member, touched upon Neo4j’s momentum over the past year.

“2021 marked an incredible year for Neo4j and graph technology at large,” said Pichette. “What really sets Neo4j’s graph technology apart is that it uniquely solves some of the world’s most complex challenges. Neo4j is poised for strong, consistent growth leading into 2022, and we’re excited to be part of that journey.”

Emil Eifrem, CEO and Co-Founder of Neo4j, reflected on the past year and leading one of only a handful of private database companies to cross $100 million in ARR.

“In 2021, we demonstrated that Neo4j is a mainstay of modern data infrastructure, grounded in a global community of developers and data scientists, empowered with a rich portfolio of technology to address complex challenges, and scale without barriers,” said Eifrem. “We enter 2022 with the wind at our backs, and the right talent and leadership in place. We’re poised to deliver Neo4j to a fast-growing user base, and continue to delight our customers as their use cases become more exacting.”

The company ended 2021 with over 600 employees, representing the largest collective of graph expertise in the world. During the course of the year, Neo4j expanded rapidly in Asia-Pacific (Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, Jakarta, and Bangalore), and Latin America (São Paulo).

Notable Neo4j 2021 milestones include:

Technology Leadership

Breaking the Graph Scale Barrier: As part of NODES 2021, Neo4j demonstrated its super-scaling technology to show real-time query performance against a graph with over 200 billion nodes and more than a trillion relationships, running on over one thousand machines.
Graphs and AI: Neo4j Graph Data Science was adopted by over 50 customers to build sophisticated AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics applications.
AuraDB Enterprise: The most deployed and trusted graph technology platform was made generally available as a fully managed service, helping organizations including Levi Strauss & Co. and Adeo to radically accelerate time to value and get to production faster.
Knowledge Graphs Accelerate Adoption: Two-thirds of Neo4j customers – including NASA – are implementing knowledge graphs to redefine what’s possible in data management and analytics.

Demonstrable Customer Value

Unsurpassed ROI: The Neo4j Graph Data Platform pays for itself more than 4x in the span of three years (417% ROI), according to a recent Forrester TEI report.
Accelerated Time to Value: According to Forrester, Neo4j showed 60% accelerated time to value, as average development time shrunk from 12 months to four.
Digital Transformation: The TEI study was based on Forrester’s in-depth interviews with Neo4j customers who realized substantial cost savings from IT modernization and rationalization.

Commercial Impact

Neo4j on Azure, GCP, and AWS: Neo4j is now globally available on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplaces. Customers can now seamlessly deploy Neo4j on the cloud platform of their choice.
New Executives and Board Members: Neo4j welcomed Kristin Thornby as Chief People Officer. Nathalie Kornhoff-Bruls of Eurazeo and Patrick Pichette of Inovia Capital both joined Neo4j’s board.
Partner Traction: Neo4j trained and certified over 1,000 graph practitioners from leading global system integrators including Accenture, Deloitte, EY, Capgemini, and PwC, in addition to closing new business with nine U.S. Federal Programs. The company expanded its partner leadership in emerging markets including Brazil, China, India, and Australia.

Market Expansion

Top 20 Database: Neo4j is the leading graph database and ranks among the 20 most popular databases globally, as tracked by DB-Engines, an independent ranking of all database management systems.
Award Wins: Neo4j was named one of CRN’s Big Data 100 Coolest Database System Companies, 2021 Data Breakthrough Awards Graph DB Solution of the Year, and 2021 Datanami Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards for Best Data and AI Technology.
Rise in Cybersecurity Graph Adoption: Companies like Deloitte and Uplevel Security increasingly sought to leverage graph databases to strengthen cybersecurity strategies in response to increasingly sophisticated threats. Graphs equip cybersecurity teams with the competitive advantage of rapid screening, improved turnaround time, quality of recommendations, and reduced false positives, ultimately allowing them to mitigate cyber threats.
Inclusion in U.S. Department of Defense (DoD ) Iron Bank: Neo4j collaborated with The DoD’s Platform One organization to develop a hardened container for its graph database technology and joins a repository of digitally signed, binary container images that have been hardened according to the Iron Bank’s Container Hardening Guide.

Community Engagement

Growing Developer Base: The global Neo4j community surpassed 240,000 members over the last year. During 2021, developers downloaded Neo4j more than 36 million times and launched more than 150,000 Neo4j Sandbox instances. Upwards of 53,000 professionals list Neo4j as a skill on their LinkedIn profiles.
The Pandora Papers: The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released the Pandora Papers, which used Neo4j to generate visualizations and make searchable records of the hidden riches of world leaders. Neo4j has been working with the ICIJ since the 2016 Panama Papers investigation.
Graphs4Good: The efforts of the Neo4j community to collaborate and help fight against the spread of COVID-19 were recognized by two honorable mentions in the AI and Data and Software categories of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards.
Largest Graph Event: Neo4j Online Developer Expo and Summit (NODES 2021) welcomed over 12,000 registrants to listen to presentations from Fujitsu Research Labs, Dataiku, BASF, Apiax, Linkurious, and more.
2021 Graphie Award Winners: This year’s nominations eclipsed all prior years, with Neo4j receiving nominations spanning more than 10 countries and awarding 27 winners including Pfizer, Qualicorp S.A., Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Lenovo, Volvo Cars, Levi Strauss & Co., and many more.

Resources

About Neo4j
Neo4j is the world’s leading graph data platform. We help organizations – including Comcast, ICIJ, NASA, UBS, and Volvo Cars – capture the rich context of the real world that exists in their data to solve challenges of any size and scale. Our customers transform their industries by curbing financial fraud and cyber crime, optimizing global networks, accelerating breakthrough research, and providing better recommendations. Neo4j delivers real-time transaction processing, advanced AI/ML, intuitive data visualization and more. Find out more at neo4j.com and follow us at @Neo4j.