Open source graph database company ArangoDB raises $27.8M

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ArangoDB, the commercial open source company behind the NoSQL graph database system of the same name, has raised $27.8 million in a series B round of funding led by Iris Capital.

Launched initially in 2011 as AvocadoDB before changing its name a year later, ArangoDB is one of several notable players in the graph database space, others being Elasticsearch, Apache Cassandra, and MongoDB. Graph databases, for the uninitiated, power many modern applications, enabling fraud detection software to ingest data from different sources to identify risks, or social networks to make friend recommendations. It’s all about joining the dots between disparate pieces of data that are not obviously related on the surface.

“The key challenge of the 21st century is to get real value out of data,” ArangoDB CEO and cofounder Claudius Weinberger noted in a press release. “Enterprises worldwide are looking for easy ways to improve business insights, use new analytics methods, and advance their AI usages.”

ArangoDB, the commercial company behind the open source database, was founded back in 2015 and now claims dual headquarters in San Francisco and Cologne, Germany. The free community ArangoDB edition is available under a fully open source license, while the company offers a fully-managed cloud incarnation that helps companies run their database without any of the infrastructure or hosting hassle, as well as an enterprise-grade edition.

The company claims a number of notable enterprise users, including Cisco, Juniper Networks, Infosys, and Barclays.

Graph database landscape

There has been a flurry of activity across the graph database space of late, with TigerGraph and Neoj4 this year raising $105 million and $325 million, respectively. Elsewhere, Memgraph this week announced it has raised $9.34 million in a seed funding round led by Microsoft’s M12, while open source newcomer TerminusDB recently closed a $4.3 million seed round to reach commercialization.

ArangoDB, for its part, had previously raised $19.2 million, including its $10 million series A round from two years ago, and with its latest cash injection the company ushered in a handful of new and old investors including Bow Capital, Target Partners, and New Forge. With another $27.8 million in the bank, the company said that it can accelerate its development of scalable graph analytics and its machine learning capabilities, while bolstering its headcount across engineering, marketing, product management, sales, and more.

“ArangoDB’s goal from day one is to make it extremely easy to handle data of any kind,” Weinberger said. “Our series B funding will allow us to accelerate our mission to make it even easier to generate real value from data, as well as enter new markets.”