How would you feel if you saw demand for your favorite topic -- which also happens to be your line of business -- grow 1,000% in just two years' time? Vindicated, overjoyed, and a bit overstretched in trying to keep up with demand, probably. Although Emil Eifrem never used those exact words when we discussed the past, present, and future of graphs, that's a reasonable projection to make. Eifrem is chief executive officer and cofounder of Neo4j, a graph database company that claims to have popularized the term "graph database" and to be the leader in the graph database category. Eifrem and Neo4j's story and insights are interesting because through them we can trace what is shaping up to be a foundational technology stack for the 2020s and beyond: graphs.

Neo4j Aura, a fully managed native graph Database as a Service (DBaaS) has just been released. The key points Neo4j emphasizes about Aura are always-on availability, on-demand scalability, and a developer-first approach. With Aura, Neo4j, and graph databases, enter the cloud era. Aura has been in the works, and we have known about it, for at least a couple of years now. Initially Aura will run on Google Cloud, and we have also known about Neo4j's partnership with Google since April 2019. So when discussing Aura with Neo4j CEO Emil Eifrem and Neo4j Cloud Product Management Director Kurt Freytag these were key points: What took Aura so long, and where does it stand in relation to the Google Cloud partnership?

They're a type of non-relational technology that depicts relationships connecting various entities -- for instance, two people in a social network. And if the news today out of graph database company Neo4j is any indication, they're a veritable cash cow. Neo4j announced that it has raised $80 million in a Series E funding round led by One Peak Ventures and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, with participation from Creandum, Eight Roads, and Greenbridge Partners. The San Mateo firm has brought in $160 million to date -- the largest cumulative investment in a graph database company, it claims -- and now has over 100 employees across offices in San Francisco and Malmö, Sweden. Emil Eifrem, Neo4j's CEO and cofounder, said the capital would be used to grow its developer tools and support popular use cases, particularly graph-enabled artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems.

Graph databases have always been useful to help find connections across a vast data set, and it turns out that capability is quite handy in artificial intelligence and machine learning too. Today, Neo4j, the makers of the open source and commercial graph database platform, announced the release of Neo4j 3.5, which has a number of new features aimed specifically at AI and machine learning. Neo4j founder and CEO Emil Eifrem says he had recognized the connection between AI and machine learning and graph databases for a while, but he says that it has taken some time for the market to catch up to the idea. "There has been a lot momentum around AI and graphs…Graphs are very fundamental to AI. At the same time we were seeing some early use cases, but not really broad adoption, and that's what we're seeing right now," he explained.