Now available: dedicated Neo4j field engineers empowering AI startups

Startups tell us they want more technical engagement, not just credits and co-marketing. Keep reading to learn what we’re building and how to work with us.

Why this team, and why now

In short: because you asked for it.

The Neo4j Startup Program has given over $1.5M USD in credits to over 700 qualifying AI startups, along with platform access and partner support over the past almost year since we announced it in our blog.

Still, feedback from founders and early engineering teams told us the same thing: the credits and the platform are great, but what they really wanted more of was technical engagement.

They wanted to talk to people who have built graph systems before, the engineers who can advise them on schema design decisions, GraphRAG architecture, multi-agent retrieval, and the production scaling questions that come up the week before a launch. Webinars and slide decks are great, but sometimes they need a working conversation.

Neo4j heard that and built a team around it. I was brought in to lead it.

What I’m hearing so far

Just a few weeks into the role, I’m uncovering the following patterns with startups primarily fall into three buckets:

1. GraphRAG architecture and schema design: Founders building agentic retrieval pipelines on top of Neo4j want help with multimodal retrieval (text + image), entity de-duplication, and schemas that LLMs can reliably generate Cypher against. This is far and away the most common technical question right now.

2. Production patterns: My proof of concept runs great! Now how can I make sure I’ve optimized my sizing, picked the right vectors and indices, chosen the proper isolation patterns, and that my queries will scale with my data?

3. Getting to a demo fast: My funding partners or co-workers are skeptical that we need to start with a graph database. I need to show them something running and fast, not a diagram. The path from “we think graph is the right technology for this” to “here’s a live prototype” is important for startups and where we need to provide you a lot of support.

If any of that matches what you’re working on, we want to help you. Please be patient as we ramp up this effort, but also please let us know what you need so we can build it in the right way.

Where to start today

Whether or not you’re already in the Startup Program, and if you aren’t sure if you need help yet, here is where you should begin:

Aura free tier — get a free Neo4j Aura instance running in a few minutes. No credit card. This is the fastest path from zero to a running graph.

GraphAcademy — Neo4j’s free training platform. The Graph Data Modeling and GraphRAG courses are the two I most often hand to founders before our first technical conversation.

Developer Center — official documentation, language drivers, and getting-started guides. Start here once you’re past the tutorial stage.

Resource Library — recorded talks, technical white papers, and customer case studies organized by use case. Great for “has anyone done this shape of problem before?” research.

Neo4j Labs — incubated tools and projects that aren’t in the supported product yet but close to the bleeding edge. Worth checking if you’re building something novel and want to see what’s coming, especially in AI.

Neo4j Agent Skills — whether you need guidance with data modeling, AI workloads, importing data, specific platforms or more, plug these into your favorite tool supporting the Agent Skills specification to get detailed guidance.

Neo4j CLI — Brand new — for scripting Neo4j interactions, AuraDB provisioning and more. Is agent friendly and comes with a built-in skill. Useful once you’re past the prototype stage and need CI/CD-managed environments.

Bonus: If you are reading this before May 15, 2026, sign up for our Aura Agent Hackathon and get even more credits!

Reach out

If you’re at a startup building on Neo4j, or want to be, I want to hear from you. If you’re working on GraphRAG, agentic systems, or anything where graph is core to your product, I need to know what you need in order to improve it.

You can reach me directly at brian.okeefe@neo4j.com. I don’t know what the response to this will be and it may take me some time to get to everything, but it will be read. This team is being shaped around real customer feedback. Tell me what you’re working on, where you’re stuck, and what would make the biggest difference. That’s how this gets built.

Now available: dedicated Neo4j field engineers empowering AI startups was originally published in Neo4j Developer Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.