Neo4j Continues Exceptional Growth in 2020, Bolstered by Customer Wins, Mainstream Adoption and Community Expansion


As Organizations Accelerate Their Digital Strategy, New and Existing Customers Turn to Neo4j to Address Critical Business Challenges

SAN MATEO, Calif., February 17, 2021Neo4j®, the leader in graph technology, experienced significant momentum in 2020, with key customer and partner wins, strong developer adoption, and unparalleled product innovation. Notable milestones included the addition of close to 80 new enterprise customers and groundbreaking graph machine learning and data science capabilities.

Enterprises adopt Neo4j’s graph technology to gain holistic visibility, accurate predictions, and data-driven insights. The global pandemic has pushed organizations to better understand and predict market drivers and risks, adjusting rapidly to changing business requirements. 

Neo4j saw impressive global customer retention and growth in 2020, with a base of almost 800 customers across numerous industries applying the company’s technology to power their innovation and success. By helping customers to address their most pressing challenges, Neo4j thrived despite the year’s macroeconomic uncertainty.  

Staying true to its mission to help the world make sense of data, Neo4j welcomed customers whose use cases span analytics and artificial intelligence, fraud detection, real-time recommendations, and knowledge graphs. Notable customers added in 2020 include ADEO, Bell Canada, China Merchants Bank, Current, Network Rail, the United Kingdom Department for Education (DfE), and Worldline. Levi Strauss & Co., Boston Scientific, and Dun & Bradstreet were among the customers that adopted Neo4j Aura™ Enterprise for friction-free graph database deployment.

Levi Strauss & Co. is one of the world’s largest brand-name apparel companies and a global leader in jeanswear. With agility and sustainability as one of their core company values, Levi’s wanted a service that matches their data-first, analytics-first mindset. Debdulal Mahanty, Director, Digital Technologies of Levi Strauss & Co., explained why Neo4j Aura Enterprise was chosen to drive agility, sustainability, and product development efficiencies.

“Neo4j has been our partner in digital transformation for almost three years, during which we have deployed six impactful applications to streamline our go-to-market processes,” Mahanty said. “At Levi Strauss & Co., we have a passion for solving challenging business problems and increasing our agility across our operations. With Neo4j Aura Enterprise, we’re able to reduce application build time and take advantage of the power of self-service databases with none of the database management overhead."

Growing mainstream popularity of the graph category attracted the attention of leading research and advisory firms. Neo4j is recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™ for Graph Data Platforms, Q4 2020. Of the 12 graph data platform providers cited, Neo4j achieved the highest scores in the current offering and strategy categories. 

Emil Eifrem, CEO and Co-Founder of Neo4j, reflected upon the past year.

“We made huge advances during 2020, with Neo4j 4 and Neo4j Graph Data Science redefining what’s possible in data and analytics – and Neo4j Aura, our fully managed cloud offering making it simple for organizations to deploy their graph applications,” Eifrem said. “Hundreds of enterprise customers trust Neo4j to build value and visibility into their businesses, and we gained widespread acclaim for our innovation and execution from leading analyst firms. 

“Neo4j thrived amid unprecedented global upheaval – a testament to the transformative power of our technology and the dedication of our employees, partners and community. I’m enormously proud of what we have achieved.”

The company wrapped up 2020 with over 420 employees across the world from Canada to China. The company appointed a VP of People and attracted top-tier executive talent, emphasizing customer-centricity, cloud service delivery, enterprise scale, and ecosystem expansion.

Neo4j 2020 milestones include:

Technology Leadership

  • Cloud-First: Over the last twelve months, more than 90% of Neo4j customers have opted to run their graph-powered applications in the cloud, many of whom are first-time graph technology users.

  • Demand for Aura: Aura, Neo4j’s fully managed cloud offering, has powered more than 2,200 applications and runs almost 5 billion graph queries per month.

  • Neo4j 4: With customers continuing to push the boundaries of graph technology, Neo4j 4 introduced new enhancements to support large-scale enterprise workloads, including database sharding, intelligent data context, and robust enterprise-grade security. 

  • First Graph Machine Learning for the Enterprise: The company announced Neo4j for Graph Data Science, a breakthrough that democratizes advanced machine learning (ML) techniques.

Commercial Impact

  • Largest Transaction: Neo4j closed several of its largest enterprise customer transactions during 2020, many representing multi-million dollar upfront commitments. 

  • Partner Traction: Neo4j certified more than 1,000 partner consultants from global system integrators including Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, DXC Technology, Infosys, PwC, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The company expanded its reach into the U.S. Federal Government by closing a reseller agreement with Carahsoft.

Market Expansion

Graph Ecosystem

  • Published Books: Neo4j employees published two books to promote awareness of graph data science, one of which – Graph Algorithms: Practical Examples in Apache Spark and Neo4j, an O’Reilly publication – has been downloaded more than 150,000 times. 

  • Connector for Apache Spark: Neo4j launched a connector for Apache Spark to help data scientists and developers combine Neo4j graph data with data from the Spark ecosystem.

  • Aura for GCP: Aura, Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service, is now available as a fully integrated graph database service on the Google Cloud Marketplace. 

  • Neo4j Powers More Applications: The company added more than a dozen new OEM partners and expanded its footprint with TCS, Precisely, and Cast Software.

  • Neo4j Startup Program: Notable program alumni include Medium, Shutl (Acquired by eBay), SOUQ (acquired by Amazon), OneFineStay (acquired by AccorHotels), and Lending Club. In 2020, the program enrolled more than 1,100 additional startups.

Developer Community Engagement

  • Growing Developer Base: The global Neo4j community surpassed 220,000 members over the last year. During 2020, developers downloaded Neo4j more than one million times and launched more than 110,000 Neo4j Sandbox instances. Upwards of 50,000 professionals list Neo4j as a skill on their LinkedIn profiles.

  • The FinCEN Files Investigation: The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) exposed the FinCEN Files, which used Neo4j to analyze suspicious activity reports. Neo4j has been working with the ICIJ since the 2016 Panama Papers investigation

  • Neo4j GraphAcademy: This year, Neo4j certified more than 2,100 developers across a broad range of course offerings, including graph data modeling, graph data science, and performance tuning.

  • Largest Digital Graph Event: Neo4j Online Developer Expo and Summit (NODES 2020) secured over 13,000 registrants to become the most well-attended event of its kind.

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About Neo4j

Neo4j is the leader in graph database technology. As the world’s most widely deployed graph database, we help global brands – including Comcast, NASA, UBS and Volvo Cars – to reveal and predict how people, processes, and systems are interrelated. Using this relationships-first approach, applications built with Neo4j tackle connected data challenges such as analytics and artificial intelligence, fraud detection, real-time recommendations, and knowledge graphs

Find out more at neo4j.com.

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