April 22, 2016
Every start-up hopes for a lucky break. Swedish company Neo Technology only found out it was getting one the day the Panama Papers made headlines around the world.
Journalists with access to the vast trove of data used the firm’s open-source database to make sense of 11.5 million documents, including emails, images and spreadsheets, leaked from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Neo Technology’s “graph database” literally connected the dots for them, helping find names of the rich and powerful and linking them to offshore accounts.
“I was blown away,” co-founder and CEO Emil Eifrem 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.
“It’s such a sweet spot for our technology, that we have a very stark example,” the 37-year-old Swede, who released his first free software project at just 16, told Reuters.While most databases use tabular searches which can find all the documents in which a name is mentioned, graph databases — imagine a spider web of lines — help reveal all the connections between those names and documents.
“You may have a prime minister connected to an address, and at that address someone else is living there who is connected to an account which is suspicious in some way,” said Eifrem, speaking from Silicon Valley amid morning rush hour traffic. Founded in 2007 in the southern Swedish city of Malmo, Neo Technology is now headquartered in San Mateo, California and employs about 120 people. It currently has around 200 paying clients, ranging from Walmart and eBay to banking groups like UBS.