With participation from Abstract Ventures, HackVC, SaxeCap, and Liquid2 Ventures, Dgraph, the firm that created the open source Graph database, announced a $6 million seed re-financing round headed by Venrock and Uncorrelated Ventures. World-class business leaders also participated in the round, including Chris Riccomini, the former US Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil, the founders of Awake Security and Astronomer, Michael Callahan and Ry Walker, as well as Confluent’s Chief Product Officer Ganesh Srinivasan and Included Health’s Head of Data JP Patil.
The creators of Dgraph recognised the need for a better graph database platform that could act as the backend for a whole application and had a deep understanding of distributed systems and developing graph systems at scale. Developers can utilise Dgraph as their backend rather than just their database by consolidating the backend into a single location and the database and service layer into a single solution. The most well-known open source graph database on GitHub since its initial release in 2016, Dgraph is also the newest startup to be recognised in Forrester’s Graph Data Platform landscape.
New executive team to lead product innovations and growth
Akon Dey, Ph.D., a seasoned member of the database business, recently assumed the position of CEO and brings with him over 20 years of expertise in the database, data stream, and enterprise data systems sectors, including Yahoo! Inc. and Visa.
Under Dey’s direction, Dgraph will invest in product development for new use cases and applications as well as accelerating the creation of go-to-market teams and initiatives to support a growing customer base. The team will also add a new set of features to the open source project and renew its management of the Dgraph community.
Gajanan Chinchwadkar, Ph.D., an industry veteran with more than 30 years of expertise at AWS, Marklogic, and Sybase in distributed database systems, multi-modal query engines, and query optimization, joins Dey on the executive team as the Chief Technology Officer.
