Neo4j

Swedish software engineer who was CTO of Windh AB, a small Swedish enterprise content-management startup, when his team's struggles forcing connected data into a relational database led him to sketch the property graph model on a napkin during a flight to Mumbai in 2000. He formally co-founded Neo Technology in Malmö in 2007 with Windh colleagues Johan Svensson and Peter Neubauer to commercialize the idea, open-sourced Neo4j, coined the term 'graph database,' and relocated the company to Silicon Valley in 2011. He co-authored O'Reilly's 'Graph Databases' with Ian Robinson and Jim Webber, and championed the Cypher query language that became the foundation of GQL, the ISO graph-query standard ratified in 2024. As CEO he has raised a $390M Series F at a $2B+ valuation (2021), pushed Neo4j past $200M in ARR by late 2024 with roughly 44% graph-DBMS market share, positioned the company at the center of the GraphRAG movement in AI, and in June 2026 agreed to acquire GraphAware to take Neo4j up-stack into intelligence analysis.