Neo Technology, a Startup which was initially based in in the southern Swedish city of Malmo, is now headquartered in San Mateo, California and employs about 120 people. This Startup has created buzz ever since the Panama papers came out.
Neo Technology‘s open source”graph database” helped connect the dots for journalists and make sense of around 11.5 million documents, including spreadsheets emails and images leaked from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. which ultimately helped them find names of the rich and powerful and linking them to offshore accounts.
According to Emil Eifrem co-founder and CEO of the firm, he was blown away by the revelations and said of the moment he discovered, just hours before publication, that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) had been using his product for the Panama Papers.
The firm is still not profitable and it is generating revenues from its enterprise edition .Eifrem allows investigative journalists use the free version of his software.
An ICIJ team had worked in secret for almost one year on the Panama Papers. The papers covered a period of almost four decades.
So what is the difference between a normal database and a graph database?
Normal databases generally use tabular searches which finds all the documents in which a name is mentioned. On the other hand, graph databases imagine a spider web of lines and help in revealing the connections between those names and documents.
Apart from the above mentioned use, banking sector use it is for identity and access management and fraud prevention. The technology is also popular with online retailers who use it to give customers personal recommendations based on their own purchases and those of others.
