Neo4j, established in 2007 in Malmö has evolved into a global leader in graph database technology, used by major enterprises, amongst them 20 of the largest banks in the US. Although officially headquartered in Silicon Valley since 2011, the company retains strong ties to its Swedish origins, with Eifrem continuing to operate from Malmö and key operations based in the city.

IPO on the Horizon

The planned IPO is expected to follow Klarna’s footsteps in targeting a US listing, taking advantage of the more favorable analyst coverage and liquidity offered by American exchanges. Speaking with Bloomberg, Eifrem highlighted the importance of being ready for the right market conditions:

“I’m focused on making sure that we’re IPO-able, that we have the ability to go public when the time is right,”

Eifrem stated

While the exact timeline and choice of banks for the IPO remain undecided, Eifrem noted that the US is the most “logical” venue for listing, echoing sentiments previously expressed by major stakeholder Greenbridge Holdings.

Financial Strength and Growth

Neo4j’s financial performance underpins its strong market position. The company boasts an impressive $200 million in annual recurring revenue and anticipates becoming cash flow positive in 2024. The latest funding round from Noteus Partners underscores investor confidence in Neo4j’s continued expansion and leadership in graph database technology.

Driving Innovation in Data Science and Graph Technology

Neo4j’s tools are critical for enterprises leveraging complex data relationships to drive insights in industries such as finance, retail, and technology. The company’s graph database technology is particularly valuable for applications such as fraud detection, recommendation engines, and network optimization.

A Milestone for both this region and Silicon Valley

As Neo4j gears up for its IPO, the development marks another milestone for this regions tech ecosystem, highlighting its ability to incubate another global success stories. For Silicon Valley, it reinforces the region’s appeal as a hub for innovative technology companies with global ambitions.

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Neo Technology is the creator of Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database that allows you to model, store and query your data in a form of a graph. Basically, it helps companies to manage large amounts of information in an easy and fast way.

Headquartered in San Mateo, Silicon Valley, with their development office still in Malmö, Neo Technology has latterly been praised as one of Sweden’s startup success stories. With customers like Walmart, UBS, Adidas and Lufthansa, it is not hard to understand why.

According to DI Digital, Ola Rollén’s monetary entry in the financing round would also mean that he would take a more active role by joining the board, with the key objective to increase sales and make way for a possible IPO in the future. However, with Rollén released from custody, but still being under investigation by Norwegian authorities for insider trading (unrelated to Hexagon), it seems that these plans are now on hold.

Neo Technology has confirmed that a financing round has been completed with a number of investors involved, including Ola Rollén through his company Greenbridge Partners. They have not, however, chosen to comment on Rollén’s insider accusation and how that might affect their future operations.

The capital raised will help finance the expansion of Neo Technology’s sales efforts as well as recruit more developers and programmers, many of whom will be based in Malmö. It will also open up opportunities to acquire small tech-companies, which will strengthen the company’s position and secure further growth.

If everything goes as one can hope, we will be able to see a young Swedish tech-startup transform itself to a established player on a major US stock exchange in the near future!

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Neo Technology is nowadays based in part in Silicon Valley, and with this investment funding in the company totals € 40 M. It was founded by Emil Eifrem, Johan Svensson and Peter Neubauer in 2007 as an open source project, and built on a technology developed by the team already in 2000. When the startup managed to get traction, it was decided to move part of it’s operation to the the US, when it raised a new round of funding. Emil opened up the SV office, while Johan and Peter stayed here. That is also how it still is – Johan, who still has the CTO role, is based in Malmö and the core product is still developed by the team in Sweden. Peter has since moved on, and is now one of the co-founders of Mapillary.

“Back when we started it was us and Polar Rose that where in the startup scene, actually sitting on the same corridor at MINC” is Emil’s remark of how it started.

Since then the startup has grown. Neo Technology has become a first hand choice for sorting and making big data useable. It can name giants such as WalMart amongst it’s customers. It is also the technology behind CrunchBase.

The startup has been thru many transistions. Not just the move of parts of operations to the US, but also the move from open source and pure technology to being a big business. The entire story can be read over at TechCrunch.

Read more what others are saying at PandoDaily and VentureBeat. As a sidenote, we can point out that with this story and the previous one from Mapillary, two startups founded here have topped TechCrunch today – not bad at all!

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The event was divided into two parts. The first was the friday session with talks, presentations and discussion panels. All with a focus on location, from many different perspectives. The second part was a 24 hours hackathon, where teams could build location based services.

Day 1: Talking about location

Some of the most interesting talks where from Måns Adler form Bambuser, Karin Bäcklund from Schibsted Media Group / hitta.se and Craig Taverner from Neo Technology / Neo4j. The entire event was filmed by the FKDV team, and we have embedded these three talks below. If you want to see everything, you can checkout the Location Day YouTube channel and we have also listed a lot of them in our TV channel section here in this site.

Day 2: Location Hacks

The second part was the hackathon. Unfortunately the combination of bad weather conditions (lack of guests from outside Malmö) and the fact that the party on the first day was too good, meant that only a handfull of teams managed to finish their builds. We do however not judge too hard, and there were some interesting hacks being demoed at the end of day two, so it all went well.

The winner of the hackathon was the ‘Hellberg‘ app, which is an automated version of the extremely popular Swedish TV quiz show “På spåret“. Using Google Streetview images together with Foursquare and Wikipedia data, the team could build an automated version of the game (going on roads) in the 24 hours: Impressive!

Footage from the event

The Demo of Hellberg:

The talks from Måns Adler, Karin Bäcklung and Graig Taverner (Unfortunatly not all of the talks where in English)

Overall a great success, and hopefully only the first Location Day of many!

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The hackathon, with it’s music focus, was an interesting twist and created some great ideas. The team got big names from the music + tech scene together, and both Spotify, SoundCloud, Neo4j and Sony Mobile participated – as well as Deezer from France and EchoNest all the way from the US.

“We are very happy to be able to put the Øresund’s tech and music scenes on the international map, with many major music and tech companies coming here for the weekend. The vision is to evolve this into a proper music conference during the next few years. Hopefully together with the local startups and the regional innovation organisations.” said an exhausted but happy Alex afterwards.

Crazy & playful hacks

In total 18 teams build hacks. Some where useful – such as webbased party playlists, some very creative, such as music visualisation with LEDs. And some just obscure – such as “dogstep”, which lets you turn music into dog barks….

The main prize winner was the Livecloud hack. A tool for live coding soundcloud app. The team had the best presentation, including live hacking (can be seen in the top video at 11:30). However, all the participants created very creative and interesting services.

You can watch the price ceremony here:

The pitches

All the demos can be found here.

If you want to see all the presentations, the live braodcasting can be seen here:

In this section LiveClouds presentation is at 11:30

Big thanks to Petter Palander from PinMeTo for livestreaming the pitches and making it possible to embed them here.

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It was held over lunch at CreativeLab, the creative event concept at the SHIP co-working space. Because we have a policy of livecasting whatever we do, you can watch the recording above (Our new Bambuser channel can be found here).

If you want to download the slides, I have made them available on slideshare but there are quite low resolution there, so can be found as pdf here as well.

I am probably describing some of the startups a little bit wrong (sorry for that), and I missed some things in the presentation (corrected in the downloadable versions). But I hope it creates some value for you as the viewer anyway.

Update 1: Some have asked why so many people are walking around and the background noice – the location where the presentation was held is the auditorium in the CreativeLab, called “trappan”, and is just that: the main stairs between the first and second floor. It is designed to be in the middle of the entire place, so that any presentations held there can have drop-in / drop-out flow. A somewhat special enviroment, but I love it, often with a lot of student from Lunds University sitting around in the open areas, and the business and entrepreneurs on the stairs themselves…

Update 2: I should of course list the top 50 startups mentioned as well! Here they are (in the order presented, i.e. in alphabetical order after category):

Series A + B

B2C

• Billetto
• Miinto
• Vivino
• WatAGame (GoSupermodel)
• Zmags

B2B

• Codesealers
• Falcon Social
• FlatFrog Laboratories
• iMotions
• Neo technology (Neo4J)
• Octoshape
• Opbeat
• Serstech
• SimpleSite (123hjemmeside)
• Tradeshift
• Trustpilot
• Unity
• Vopium

Seed level

B2C

• Bownty
• Click-A-Taxi
• Coolstuff
• Flattr
• Foap
• Tasspass
• Retevo (Roliga Prylar / Alphageek)

B2B

• Anyfi
• Atosho
• Conferize
• Crunchfish
• Deskwolf
• Dexplora (GetSalesDone and brisk.io)
• Firmafon
• GameAnalytics
• Graduateland
• InRiver
• Insurance Business Applications
• OneRecruit
• Sepior
• The Eye Tribe
• Wallmob
• Zaplox

Other prominent startups

• 23
• Echo.it
• Kvittar
• MovieStarPlanet
• Momondo
• Planeto
• Riidr
• Zendesk

The post Øresund Startups: Top50 and state of the region appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

The talk will highlight some of the lessons they’ve learned while developing the product, raising money, flipping the company to the US, and building for growth in both the US and EU. Peter is a founding member of OPS4J and, together with Niclas Hedhman, has been involved in the initial discussion of the OPS (Open Participation Software) community model that is practiced at OPS4J. The focus is on turning Open Source Projects into profitable companies, creating products with a sustainable community process and Open Participation.

More details and sign up here

When: Tuesday 23 July; 18:00 – 20:30
Where: Creative Destruction, Dampfærgevej 2A, 2100, Copenhagen

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The prestigious list includes 5 Øresund region companies (click for Ny Teknik articles): Neo Technology, Zaplox, Sol Voltaics, Anolytech, and Trialbee.

Developed in in Malmö, Neo Technology is still running hot with its Neo4j graph database, having moved its head office to the Silicon Valley, and hits the 33-list for the third year running. Newcomer cleantech from Ystad, Anolytech, appears for its enviro-friendly process to contribute to a world with less toxins and antibiotics, providing big problem solutions.

Zaplox, from Lund, is unlocking us from physical keys, to open doors with smartphones. The application for mobile keys include check- in and out services and pay-by-phone at hotels. Sol Voltaics, is developing solar cells efficient and economical enough to compete with fossil fuels. The technology improves efficiency of energy capture, generation and storage using nano-materials, is based on world-leading research conducted at Lund University. Trialbee, Lund-based software developers, are using web-based statistical models and a collaboration platform between patients and pharma companies, to increase speed and accuracy of patient recruitment and retention in clinical trials.

The competition criteria considers market potential, access to financing and management daring-to-challenge attitude, rather the typical employee numbers or turnover measures. The judges conduct interviews with business, technology and industry experts to appoint with the final winners come from all industries, all over Sweden. Check out the full list.

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The company has shown impressive growth, stating a 440% growth since 2011. Also, just being able to put out a pressrelease with a quote from Seth Godin (CEO of Squidoo) must indeed be considered an indicator of success!

Neo4j, their main product, is one of the world’s leading graph database, having recently been selected at InfoWorlds 2012 awards. It provides a reliable Java-based platform for conquering highly interconnected database problems. With an list of impressive costumers it has become an integrated part of many others products.

The raised capital will be used for hiring 15-20 new employees, 5-10 of them engineers. With the layoffs at Ericsson, Nokia and other big tech companies in the region, the timing looks good for finding highly competent engineers. The team is however not afraid of hiring where the talent is:

“How many them will be based in Malmö is hard to say, as we will be going for skills and expertise only when recruiting”

CEO Emil Eifrém said to Rapidus.

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