# Franz

> Franz Inc. is a privately held software company in Lafayette, California, founded in 1984 to support and extend Lisp. It now sells AllegroGraph, an RDF knowledge graph database with reasoning, vector, and visualization tools, alongside Allegro CL and consulting for organizations with complex connected data.

- **Founded:** 1984
- **Headquarters:** Lafayette, United States
- **Founders:** Fritz Kunze (Co-founder and founding CEO), John Foderaro (Co-founder and chief scientist), Kevin Layer (Co-founder and chief operations officer), Keith Sklower (Co-founder)
- **Products:** AllegroGraph, Allegro CL, Gruff, Professional services
- **Notable:** Founded in 1984 with $500 of founder capital., Released its Common Lisp implementation by the end of 1986 and renamed it Allegro CL in 1988., Reported a 2011 demonstration loading and querying one trillion RDF statements with Intel and Stillwater SuperComputing support.

## Products & services

- **AllegroGraph** — Commercial RDF graph database and knowledge graph platform with SPARQL, Prolog reasoning, temporal and geospatial features, vector storage, and LLM integrations.
- **Allegro CL** — Commercial Common Lisp implementation and development environment.
- **Gruff** — Visual graph browser, editor, and graphical query builder for AllegroGraph and SPARQL endpoints.
- **Professional services** — Consulting, training, and implementation support for data integration and knowledge graph projects.

## Achievements

- Founded in 1984 with $500 of founder capital.
- Released its Common Lisp implementation by the end of 1986 and renamed it Allegro CL in 1988.
- Reported a 2011 demonstration loading and querying one trillion RDF statements with Intel and Stillwater SuperComputing support.
- Continues to publish AllegroGraph 9.0.3 documentation in 2026.

## Latest updates

- **2026-08** — AllegroGraph 9.0.3 documentation and quick start were updated; current documentation covers graph, LLM, and vector features.
- **2026-05** — Franz published a 2026 consulting services agreement for its professional services business.

## Links

- Website: https://franz.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/franz-inc
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/Franzinc
- GitHub: https://github.com/franzinc
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/AllegroGraph
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FranzAllegroGraph

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/franz
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-30