Neo4j Accelerates Growth with Addition of New CFO, Board Member
Industry Veteran Mike Asher & Snowflake CMO Denise Persson Join Graph Market Leader
SAN MATEO, Calif. – December 13, 2018 – Neo4j, the leader in graph databases, announced today that Mike Asher has joined as the company’s first chief financial officer (CFO), and Denise Persson, chief marketing officer (CMO) of Snowflake Computing, has joined the company’s Board of Directors.
Asher and Persson both join Neo4j during a time of unprecedented growth and momentum. Last month, the company closed an $80 million Series E funding round led by One Peak Partners and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital. Asher and Persson’s respective industry expertise will propel Neo4j through its next phase of growth and expansion into new markets.
More than 75 percent of the Fortune 100 use Neo4j, and the company has increased its customer count to more than 300 companies, including UBS, Walmart, eBay and Adobe.
Mike Asher will oversee Neo4j’s 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, Asher has spearheaded the financial strategy and global expansion for a number of fast-growing startups from early stages through to successful exit.
Mike joins 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 Dell EMC.
“I’ve been working with high-growth, VC-backed startups for over twenty years, and I’m excited to work with Neo4j,” said Asher. “As the pioneer and market leader in graph database technology, Neo4j has already built a strong company foundation, an award-winning product, a loyal customer base, and a talented team. I’m here to build upon that success at scale.”
In tandem, Neo4j welcomed Denise Persson, the CMO of Snowflake Computing, to the company’s Board of Directors as an independent member. Persson has more than 20 years of technology marketing experience at high-growth companies including Apigee, ON24 and Genesys, and she has helped take two companies through successful initial public offerings.
Persson has always had a passion for tackling difficult challenges with the power of data, and she’s excited to see Neo4j doing the same in the graph database sector.
“There’s nothing more exciting than a category-creating company,” said Persson. “Neo4j leads the graph database category, and its graph platform helps an incredible list of Fortune 500 customers solve hard data problems. I’m both proud and excited to be a part of Neo4j’s journey as graph databases become an enterprise standard.”
Emil Eifrem, Neo4j’s CEO and Co-Founder, welcomed Asher and Persson to each of their respective new roles.
“Mike and Denise both share our belief in the disruptive power of connected data,” said Eifrem. “As demand explodes for graph database technology, I’m confident that Mike’s impressive financial and strategic background in high-growth startups, alongside Denise’s proven go-to-market expertise within Silicon Valley, will increase Neo4j’s lead in the fastest growing segment of the database market.”Learn more about Mike Asher’s addition as CFO in his official interview, and read more about Denise Persson’s appointment to Neo4j’s Board of Directors in her interview with Emil Eifrem.
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Neo4j is the leading graph database platform that drives innovation and competitive advantage at Airbus, Comcast, eBay, NASA, UBS, Walmart and more. Thousands of community deployments and more than 300 customers harness connected data with Neo4j to reveal how people, processes, locations and systems are interrelated. Using this relationships-first approach, applications built using Neo4j tackle connected data challenges including artificial intelligence, fraud detection, real-time recommendations and master data. Find out more at neo4j.com.