Emil Eifrem sketched the idea for what would become the property graph model on the back of a napkin during a flight to Mumbai in 2000. Together with co-founder Johan Svensson, he spent the next decade building Neo4j from a garage project in Malmo, Sweden, into the world's leading graph database. Their founding conviction was that data's real value lies not in individual records, but in the connections between them.

In 2010, Neo4j launched as an open-source graph database and quickly attracted a global community of developers alongside enterprise customers spanning financial services, logistics, healthcare, and technology. Trusted by organisations from NASA to Airbnb, the platform powers fraud detection, real-time recommendations, and supply chain analysis for some of the world's most data-intensive businesses. Dawn participated in Neo4j's $20 million Series C in 2015. The company went on to reach a valuation north of $2 billion and is now listed on Nasdaq North.