Imagine a graph database that’s not aimed at the growing graph database market, selling to Fortune 500 without sales, and claiming to be the fastest without benchmarks. Dgraph is unique in some interesting ways.

If you were an investor, would you give a mid-sized startup comprised fully of engineers and sporting an open source product $11.5 million to pursue a singular path amidst heavy competition? You might, if it was in the hottest area of data management, was founded by an ex-Googler with deep expertise on the topic, and had a few Fortune 500 customers already.

That’s what Redpoint Ventures, with participation from previous investors Bain Capital Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Grok Ventures and Airtree Ventures just did for Dgraph, Manish Jain’s open source graph database startup. During his time at Google, Jain led the knowledge graph serving system effort.

Though we don’t usually cover funding rounds, this one was an opportunity to connect with Jain. Dgraph and Jain both have a sort of undercurrent reputation in the graph database world, and the conversation did not disappoint.

First off, even if you have not been following us (we’ve been in the graph database space earlier than most), you may have noticed when the Gartner oracles spoke graph earlier this year:

“The application of graph processing and graph DBMSs will grow at 100 percent annually through 2022 to continuously accelerate data preparation and enable more complex and adaptive data science.

Graph data stores can efficiently model, explore and query data with complex interrelationships across data silos, but the need for specialized skills has limited their adoption to date.

Graph analytics will grow in the next few years due to the need to ask complex questions across complex data, which is not always practical or even possible at scale using SQL queries”.

Amen to that, and even if you did not take note, VCs apparently did. The conversation with Jain started off talking money. Before today, Dgraph had raised a total of $3M in seed and pre-seed rounds. Jain estimates this round A funding should give them a runway till 2022. Depending on how the team grows, that is, which was a good way to pick up on the conversation.

Read the full article on ZDNet