database-technology
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Emil Eifrem
Emil Eifrem is the co-founder and CEO of Neo4j, the company he built from a cocktail-napkin sketch on a 2000 flight to Mumbai into the world's leading graph database platform. He coined the term 'graph database,' developed the property graph model, and has guided Neo4j to a $2.2B valuation, over $200M in annual revenue, and adoption by 84 of the Fortune 100. Beyond enterprise metrics, he launched the Graphs4Good program channeling graph technology toward cancer research, pandemic supply chains, and investigative journalism — most famously the Panama Papers investigation that won the Pulitzer Prize and toppled Iceland's government.
Sherman Ye
Sherman Ye is the Founder and CEO of NebulaGraph (vesoft Inc.), the company behind one of the world's most scalable open-source distributed graph databases. After engineering stints at Facebook and Ant Financial — where he worked directly on graph database infrastructure — Ye founded vesoft in 2018 to bring enterprise-grade graph database technology to a market hungry for connected-data insights. NebulaGraph can handle trillions of edges with millisecond latency, and counts Tencent, Meituan, and JD Digits among its users. Ye led the company through a $8M pre-A round in 2020 and a Series A in 2022 led by Jeneration Capital, while pioneering the GraphRAG concept that merges knowledge graphs with large language models.
Subbu Iyer
Subbu Iyer is the President and CEO of Aerospike, a real-time NoSQL database company powering some of the world's most demanding data workloads at sub-millisecond latency. With 30 years of enterprise technology leadership across Oracle, VERITAS, HP, Dell EMC, and Riverbed Technology, Iyer took the helm at Aerospike in January 2022 and has since led the company through a pivotal transformation into AI infrastructure, closing $109M in growth capital in April 2024 and an additional $30M in December 2024. Under his leadership, Aerospike expanded from a key-value store into a multi-model database supporting vector, graph, and document data - positioning it squarely at the intersection of real-time data and generative AI.