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.
Happy Emil Eifrem & Peter Neubauer, Neo Technology
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.
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
I like NoSQL, but one of the upsides with SQL is the ability to dump backups to files, in a readable format. There are still few NoSQL implementations that think of this issue.
I think most of us still use SQL (+ memcached) for more important data.
BTW, never use Java for servers, that is stupid! Almost all web clusters use *NIX anyway.
Hi Mattias,
So we support exporting the graph to disk in any kind of RDF serialization format (RDF/XML, n3, etc). Then you can insert that into a triplestore or an RDBMS using one of the many RDF->SQL tools.
As for using Java, no comments. :) Suffice to say that a lot of the current NOSQL servers (Voldemort, HBase, etc) have been written in Java and have been proven to be both highly performant and robust in production at some of the largest sites in the world. Also, a majority of our customers and prospects use Java in the backend.
Either way, I think we’re moving to a polyglot language world in parallel to a polyglot persistence world. The internal language of your services really shouldn’t matter as long as they expose a REST API or SPARQL end point.
Cheers,
-EE
Great with the serialization support!
Java is a good language, I used to code a lot of Java earlier. The problem is that Java-people tend to write heavy code not optimized for performance and memory. Maybe you can though! :)
Hey Mattias –
I certainly hope we’re in that camp. Feel free to benchmark us to find out! :)
Cheers,
-EE