Neo4j Funding Latest in Real-Time Market Investments

Neo4j, which offers a graph database platform, today announced a Series F funding round as part of a $325 million investment led by Eurazeo with participation from GV (formerly Google Ventures). Existing investors One Peak (an investor since 2018), Creandum (an investor since 2014), and Greenbridge Partners (an investor since 2016), as well as new investors DTCP and Lightrock, also participated.

Today’s transaction represents the largest investment in a private database company, according to the company, and raises Neo4j’s valuation to over $2 billion.

Neo4j’s funding is just the latest in what has been a banner year for huge industry investments in all things related to real-time analytics. For example, earlier this week, Imply announced the closing of $70 million Series C funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Tiger Global Management, bringing total funding to over $116 million.

[After this article was published, Nylas, the communications API platform for email, scheduling, and work automation tools for developers and enterprises, announced on July 18 that it has raised $120 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from existing investors, as well as new investors.] 

Part of a larger trend

Such large investments are a continuation of an overall strong funding market in real-time analytics, including companies that specialize in database technology, graph analytics, and more.

Additionally, large late-stage funding, such as the Neo4j series F round, is becoming more common. In the first quarter of this year, late-stage funding, in general, grew at 56 percent quarter over quarter and more than doubled at 122 percent year over year, according to Crunchbase. 

Not only is there more late-state funding, but the amounts are going up too. Crunchbase notes: “A higher proportion of the growth in late-stage growth is in rounds above $100 million. Fully 79 percent of dollars at late stage is in rounds of $100 million and above this quarter, compared to 74 percent in the previous quarter and 63 percent in the first quarter of 2020.”

A sampling of the huge investments that have been made this year in the real-time analytics and applications space puts the dollar values into perspective. They include:

• $1 billion Series G funding for Databricks, which offers a lakehouse platform that combines the best of data lakes data warehouses for data, analytics, and AI.
• $750 million Series F funding for UiPath, which develops robotic process automation and artificial intelligence software. 
• $475 million Series F funding for Dataminr, which offers a real-time AI platform that detects signals of high-impact events and emerging risks from within publicly available data.
• $270 million Series E funding for Airtable, which offers a low code platform for building collaborative applications.