Technology

Neo4j has helped popularize the graph database. Today it was rewarded with an $80 million Series E to bring their products to a wider market in what could be the companylast private fundraise.

The round was led by One Peak Partners and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital with participation from existing investors Creandum, Eight Roads and Greenbridge Partners. Todayinvestment exactly doubles their previous amount bringing the total raised to $160 million.

Neo4j founder and CEO Emil Eifrem didn&t want to discuss valuation, calling it essentially a vanity metric. &We&re not sharing that. I never understood that. Itjust weird bragging rights. It makes no sense to customers, and makes no sense to anyone,& he said referring to the valuation.

Graph view of Neo4j funding rounds. Graphic: Neo4j

When you bring a company like Morgan Stanley on as an investor, it could be interpreted as a kind of signal that the company is thinking ahead to going public. While Eifrem wasn&t ready to commit to anything, he suggested that this is very likely the last time he raises funds privately. He says that he doesn&t like to think in terms of how he will exit so much as building a good company and seeing where that takes him. &If your mental framework is around building a great company, you&re going to have all kinds of options along the way. So thatwhat I&m completely focused on,& Eifrem explained.

In 2016, when his company got a $36 million Series D investment, Eifrem says that they were working to expand in the enterprise. They have been successful with around 200 enterprise customers to their credit including Walmart, UBS, IBM and NASA. He says their customers include 20 of the top 25 banks and 7 of the top 10 retailers.

This year, the company began expanding into artificial intelligence. It makes sense. Graph databases help companies understand the connections in large datasets and AI usually involves large amounts of data to drive the learning models.

Two common graph database use case examples are the social graph on a social site like Facebook, which lets you see the connections between you and your friends or the purchase graph on an Ecommerce site like Amazon which lets you see if you bought one product, chances are you&ll also be interested in these others (based on your purchase history and what other consumers have done who have bought similar products).

Eifrem wants to use the money to expand the company internationally and provide localized service in terms of language and culture wherever their customers happen to be. As an example, he says today European customers might get an English speaking customer service agent if they called in for help. He wants to provide service and the website in the local language and the money should help accomplish that.

Neo4j was founded in 2007 as an open source project. Companies and individuals can still download the base product for free, but the company has also built a successful and growing commercial business on top of that open source project. With an $80 million runway, the next stop could be Wall Street.

On December 11, just slightly more than a month away, up to 15 exceptional startups will arrive in Lagos, Nigeria to compete in Startup Battlefield Africa 2018. Don&t miss your opportunity to watch founders of Africabest early-stage tech startups as they launch on a global stage to vie for a cash infusion, investor attention and serious bragging rights.

We have a limited number of spectator tickets, and they&re selling fast, so be sure to grab yours while you still can.Buy your ticket heretoday for just $10 + VAT.

The price of admission provides a full day packed with action. We&re interspersing three rounds of Startup Battlefield competition with an amazing roster of speakers and panel discussions addressing the continentrapidly expanding startup scene.

You&ll hear from speakers like Marième Diop, an investor at Orange Digital Ventures Africa. Diop focuses on early-stage African startups (like a$16 million roundfor South African fintech startup, Yoco, and an $8.6 million round to business enterprise software startup, AfricaTalking), and she&ll discuss venture capital in Africa.

We also have on tapShikoh Gitau, the head of product at SafaricomAlpha incubator. Gitau led a Pan-African and global search for candidates to form the incubator team, and she&ll share her perspective on the talent and innovation within Africaexpanding startup landscape. She&ll also talk about repatriating entrepreneurs.

If you haven&t ever experienced a Startup Battlefield, you&re in for a huge adrenaline rush. The competing founders have been honing their pitch skills with coaching help from seasoned TechCrunch editors, and they&ll be fired up and ready to make their case. Herehow the Battlefield works.

Startup Battlefield consists of three preliminary rounds with up to five startups in each round. Startup teams get six minutes to pitch and present a live demo to a panel of judges consisting of top tech founders and VCs. Those judges then have six minutes to question each team thoroughly.

No more than five teams move to the finals for another round of pitches and more challenging questions. Only one startup will claim the auspicious title of Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 champion.

The winning founders receive US$25,000 in no-equity cash, plus a trip for two to compete in Startup Battlefield in San Francisco at TechCrunch Disrupt 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).

Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 takes place December 11 in Lagos, Nigeria, and spectator tickets are limited and going fast. Buy your tickets now and join us for an exciting day focused on the very best that Africastartup ecosystem has to offer.

When Homeland Security told all federal government departments last year to roll out a new email security policy to cut down on incoming spam and phishing emails, three-quarters of all federal domains were compliant by the time of their deadline just a few weeks ago.

Thatfar more than what the Fortune 500 accomplished in the same period.

New data from Agari shows that just half of the Fortune 500 have deployed DMARC— or domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance policy. Email systems use DMARC policies to verify the identity of an email sender, ensuring that itnot impersonating another domain. Depending on the DMARC settings, an email system can either monitor, quarantine or entirely reject spoofed emails, helping to cut down on the number of phishing emails that land in your corporate inbox.

The data shows 51 percent of the Fortune 500 — the worldwealthiest companies — are now using DMARC. Thatan improvement from about one-third a year ago, but it still trails behind the federal governmentDMARC adoption.

But only 13 percent of those companies are employing a quarantine or reject policy — which actively intercepts spoofed emails and marks them as spam or bounces them from a userinbox altogether.

According to Agaribreakdown: Aetna, American Express, Bank of America, Capital One, Facebook, Fedex, Microsoft, Netflix, PayPal, UPS and Wells Fargo ranked among the companies with the strongest DMARC policy.

Boeing, CBS, Discovery, Exxon Mobil, Frontier, JetBlue, NetApp, Time Warner Cable (Spectrum), Prudential, Viacom and Xerox are some of the worst contenders with no record whatsoever.

Agari, which has a commercial stake in the email security business, said that having a well-configured DMARC policy &cannot be overstated.&

Scammers often use spoofed emails to try to trick companies into sending back sensitive taxpayer information or other corporate secrets. Known as the &W-2 phishing scam,& legitimate-looking emails try to obtain W-2 tax forms of employees so that the scammers can file fraudulent forms during tax season in order to obtain hefty refunds. The FBI says these scams cost businesses $12 billion a year.

But DMARC is meant to weed out the bulk of those spoofed emails. According to Agari, one of its customers — a global e-commerce firm — was getting millions of impersonated emails per day, spoofing the company&from& domain to make it look like the real deal. After the company implemented its new DMARC policy to reject spoofed emails, the number went down by 99 percent.

&The damage from these attacks has ballooned into billions of dollars annually—however the real cost is the erosion of trust in digital business,& said AgariArmen Najarian.