Our Leaders
People Behind the Graph
Meet the leaders, board members, and advisors building the future of graph technology at Neo4j.
6
Executives
7
Board members
3
Advisors
Executive leadership
The team driving Neo4j's vision, product innovation, and global growth.
Emil Eifrem
Chief Executive Officer
Emil Eifrem is Neo4j’s Co-Founder and CEO. He sketched what today is known as the property graph model on a flight to Mumbai in 2000 and has devoted his professional life to building, innovating, and evangelizing graph databases and graph analytics. He is also co-author of the O'Reilly book Graph Databases.
Neo4j today helps more than 75 of the Fortune 100, and a community of over 250,000 open-source data developers, data scientists, and architects, find hidden relationships and patterns across billions of connections deeply, easily, and quickly. Emil plans to change the world with graphs and own Larry's yacht by the end of the decade.
Magnus Vejlstrup
Senior Vice President, Engineering
Magnus Vejlstrup is Neo4j's SVP of Engineering. He has been leading the Neo4j product engineering organization since 2013. Prior to that, he worked in various leadership and developer positions both in Scandinavia and the US at companies like Agillic, Siebel Systems, Centura Software, DSC Communications, and others. He is based in Malmö, Sweden.
Mark Woodhams
Chief Revenue Officer
Mark Woodhams is Chief Revenue Officer at Neo4j, overseeing the company’s global field and partner operations, services, and customer success organizations. He brings more than 35 years of leadership experience in enterprise software sales, with a track record of scaling high-performing global teams and driving sustainable revenue growth.
Prior to Neo4j. Mark was CRO at BlackLine (NASDAQ: BL) and held leadership roles at Netsuite, Oracle, Hyperion, Capgemini, and other leading organizations. He has lived and worked extensively in the US and UK, and is currently based in London.
Mike Asher
Chief Financial Officer
Mike Asher is Neo4j's Chief Finance Officer. He oversees financial planning and operations, focusing on growth and scale. He brings more than two decades of finance experience across a broad range of companies, both public and privately held. Throughout his career, Mike has spearheaded the financial strategy and global expansion for a number of fast-growing startups from early stages through to successful exits.
Mike joined Neo4j from HackerRank, a technical hiring network. He also led the finance function for data management innovator, Greenplum Software, where he helped the company grow from a small startup to an eventual acquisition by EMC (Dell), as well as Platfora, a big data analytics company acquired by Workday. He also sits on the Board of Tackle.io, a company he co-founded. He is based in Silicon Valley.
Sudhir Hasbe
President, Technology
Sudhir Hasbe is Neo4j’s President, Technology. Sudhir previously led product management for Google Cloud’s Data Analytics Platform which includes industry-leading products like BigQuery, Looker, Dataproc, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Composer, Data Fusion, and Dataplex. Under his leadership, BigQuery grew to be one of the largest analytics platforms with tens of thousands of customers, 110TB of data being processed every second, hundreds of customers with petabyte-scale datasets, and powering more than 700 ISV offerings. Hasbe also led acquisitions of Looker, Dataform, Cask, and CompilerWorks to enhance Google Cloud’s Data Analytics offering.
Sudhir was also an executive sponsor of several of Google Cloud’s marquee enterprise customers and ecosystem partners. Prior to Google, Hasbe led software engineering at Zulily, transforming it into a state-of-the-art data-driven organization. Prior to Zulilly, Sudhir spent seven years at Microsoft where he led product management for Xbox entertainment services, Azure Data Marketplace SQL Azure, and BizTalk Server. He is based in Seattle, WA.
Philip Rathle
Chief Technology Officer
Philip Rathle is Neo4j’s Chief Technology Officer, focused on vision, evangelism, and cultivating executive relationships across the tech ecosystem. He was the company’s first product leader for more than a decade, establishing Neo4j as a leading player in the modern database landscape and growing its offering from a single database product to a rich portfolio that includes the Neo4j graph database, data science & analytics, visualization, and tools & connectors.
Philip is an early pioneer in customer data integration, and previously led Product Management for Embarcadero Technologies overseeing a portfolio of 10 database and developer products. As a consultant earlier in his career, Philip spent nearly a decade solving large-scale information processing problems for the Fortune 500, working at Tanning Technology and Accenture, with a focus on database, architecture, and data modeling. He is based in Silicon Valley.
Board of directors
Experienced investors and operators guiding Neo4j's long-term strategy.
Emil Eifrem
Chief Executive Officer
Emil Eifrem is Neo4j’s Co-Founder and CEO. He sketched what today is known as the property graph model on a flight to Mumbai in 2000 and has devoted his professional life to building, innovating, and evangelizing graph databases and graph analytics. He is also co-author of the O'Reilly book Graph Databases.
Neo4j today helps more than 75 of the Fortune 100, and a community of over 250,000 open-source data developers, data scientists, and architects, find hidden relationships and patterns across billions of connections deeply, easily, and quickly. Emil plans to change the world with graphs and own Larry's yacht by the end of the decade.
Christian Jepsen
Board Member
Christian co-founded Heartcore Capital in 2007 out of a desire to work with talented and courageous founders in order to help them fulfill their visions. At Heartcore Christian focuses on digital health, productivity software and finance. He is an entrepreneur and the co-founder of Heartcore, responsible for its investments in Tink, Natural Cycles, Kaia Health, Issuu and others, where he also sits on the Board. Christian holds a BSc in electrical engineering from the Danish Engineering Academy and an MBA from Georgetown University.
David Klein
Board Member
David is Co-founder and Managing Partner of One Peak, and focuses on investments in the technology sector in Europe. His investment and board experience at One Peak includes Ardoq, Brightflag, Coople, Cymulate, DataGuard, Deepki, DocPlanner, EMnify, HighQ, Infermedica, Keepit, Lucca, Neo4j, Orgvue, PandaDoc, Paysend, Quentic, and Spryker.
Prior to One Peak, David was a senior investment professional at growth equity fund Summit Partners in London where he was responsible for technology investments across Europe and Israel, with a focus on software and communications technology. He also led growth investments at Morgan Stanley Principal Investments in Europe and Israel. He started his career in the Technology, Media & Telecommunications Group at Morgan Stanley in London and São Paulo. David enjoys sports, traveling, and arts. He was also a trustee of Age UK Tower Hamlet, the UK’s largest charity for the elderly.
David speaks English, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. He holds a Master’s degree in Economics and Business Administration from University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Ola Rollén
Board Member
Ola Rollén served as President and CEO of Hexagon from 2000 through the end of 2022, shaping the company into the world leader it is today. As of January 2023, he holds the position of Chairman of the Board for Hexagon as well as Greenbridge, the investment company he founded together with Hexagon’s owner Melker Schörling.
Prior to Hexagon, Rollén held the positions of president of Sandvik Materials Technology, executive vice president of Avesta-Sheffield and president of Kanthal.
Rollén holds a Bachelor of Science degree in economics.
Patrick Pichette
Board Member
Patrick Pichette is a partner at Inovia Capital. He has 30 years of financial and operating expertise leading world-class companies such as Google, Sprint Canada, and Bell Canada, to break through the complexities of hyper-growth and digital transformation. Patrick is the lead independent director of the Board of Lightspeed Commerce, and served on the Board of Directors of Twitter, co-leading the sale of the Company to Elon Musk for $44B in 2022. He also currently serves as an independent investor, advisor, and board member to several startups and innovation networks in Europe and North America.
Romain Mombert
Board Member
Romain Mombert is an Investment Director within the Growth team. He joined in 2020 and participates in the research of investment opportunities within this fund.
Prior to joining Eurazeo, Romain was an Analyst at Arma Partners, a tech-focused investment bank based in London, within the Growth Financing Advisory division. During this time, he advised companies such as Wolt, Evaneos, Holidu and Talentsoft. Prior to that, Romain was an Analyst at Avolta Partners, where he advised on Series A and B fundraising transactions. He started his career at Semji, a B2B SaaS startup company based in Lyon, where he was in charge of the finance department.
Romain graduated from ESCP and the Paris School of Business. He also studied at the Copenhagen Business School.
Michael Treskow
Board Observer
Michael is a Partner at Eight Roads Ventures in London, focusing on venture and growth investments in technology companies across Europe and Israel.
Previously, Michael invested in technology companies at Accel in London, and Warburg Pincus in San Francisco and New York. He received a BA from Yale University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Advisors
Industry veterans who lend their expertise to Neo4j's mission.
Denise Persson
Advisor
Denise Persson is the Chief Marketing Officer of Snowflake Computing, a cloud data warehouse company, where she leads worldwide marketing, including demand generation, product marketing, analyst relations, public relations, and brand strategy. With a career that spans over 20 years, she has built and led global marketing teams for high-growth, category-creating tech companies and guided a number of businesses through multiple growth phases including mergers and acquisitions and two public offerings. Prior to joining Snowflake, Denise served as the CMO of Apigee, an API platform company that went public in 2015, and ON24. Previous to these roles, Denise was the EVP of global marketing at Genesys, a publicly traded company and leading SaaS provider of unified conferencing and collaboration services. At Genesys, she helped grow revenues tenfold from $20 million to $200 million and the product base rose to include 200 of the Global Fortune 500. Denise has lived and worked outside Sweden for 18 years, including four years in Paris and 14 years in Silicon Valley, Denver, and Washington, DC. She holds a BA in Business Administration and Economics from Stockholm University and an MBA from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
Eric Ries
Advisor
Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which has sold over one million copies and has been translated into more than thirty languages. He is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology, which has become a global movement in business, practiced by individuals and companies around the world. This methodology was the inspiration behind his founding of the LTSE and his books The Leader's Guide and The Startup Way. He has founded a number of startups, including IMVU, where he served as CTO, and he has advised on business and product strategy for startups, venture capital firms, and large companies, including GE, with whom he partnered to create the FastWorks program. Eric has served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School, IDEO, and Pivotal, and he is the founder and CEO of the Long-Term Stock Exchange. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.
Lars Nordwall
Advisor
Lars Nordwall, former President of Field Operations at Neo4j, is an investor and entrepreneurial leader in the big data, cloud, SaaS, and open source arena, across early-stage technology firms and public companies. He was the founding VP of Worldwide Sales at SugarCRM where he ramped the customer base to more than 4000 organizations, and established the company as a market leader. He was SVP of Business Development and then SVP of Worldwide Sales at Pentaho (an open source Business Intelligence firm), where he orchestrated a company turn-around with 100%+ annual booking growth and entry into the Big Data domain, as a result. Earlier in his career, Lars had various roles at Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP), including the Director of the Worldwide Business Intelligence & Analytics practice. Lars also spent time at Novell in a number of senior executive positions, following the acquisition of CTP. He has an M.Sc. Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm & Munich, a B.Sc. in Business Administration from the Stockholm University School of Business, and he has completed an Executive Education Program at Harvard Business School.