With $105 million in new financing, TigerGraph is planning to invest in more product development and expand its operations into new geographic regions.
TigerGraph said on Wednesday it raised $105 million in venture capital financing, bringing its total funding to more than $170 million.
The financing represents TigerGraph's Series C round, led by Tiger Global, after raising $32 million in September 2019, $31 million in September 2017 and $3.7 million in seed funding in 2013.
TigerGraph, founded in 2012 and based in Redwood City, Calif., is a native graph database vendor whose platform -- which includes both TigerGraph DB and TigerGraph Cloud -- enables customers to access data in different ways than traditional relational databases. Unlike relational databases, which connect data points to only one other data point at a time, graph databases enable data points to connect to multiple data points simultaneously, thus speeding up the process of creating data sets to use to make data-driven decisions.
The vendor plans to use the new capital to fund product development, including adding the TigerGraph Cloud to the Google Cloud Platform in March 2021 and expanding its multi-region support on AWS and Microsoft Azure. In addition, it plans to expand geographically, adding local support in Asia and Australia and New Zealand, and plans to add staff in already established locales throughout the Americas, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
The funding is evidence that TigerGraph is heading in the right direction with its expansion plans, according to Doug Henschen, principal analyst at Constellation Research.
A sample screenshot from TigerGraph shows a no-code visual query under development.
"TigerGraph's strong Series C round looks like a vote of confidence that it's on a good path toward broad, cloud-centric adoption," he said.
Henschen added, however, that technology vendors are attracting significant attention from capital investors and that while $105 million is significant for TigerGraph, it's not on the level of what some others have raised in recent funding rounds.
TigerGraph's strong Series C round looks like a vote of confidence that it's on a good path toward broad, cloud-centric adoption.
Doug HenschenPrincipal analyst, Constellation Research
"I'm seeing a lot of eye-popping valuations these days, so $105 million for a series C doesn't seem at all surprising," Henschen said.
While the infusion of $105 million in additional capital will enable TigerGraph to invest in product development and expand its geographical footprint, the vendor is also taking advantage of growing demand for graph database technology.
According to the vendor, which remains private and therefore does not publicize its earnings, it more than doubled its revenues in 2020 while also doubling its customer base.
Meanwhile, by the start of 2023, 30% of organizations worldwide will use graph technologies to enable data-driven decision-making, according to Gartner.
"Graph has been around and has more than proven its value for public-facing social networks, but it's still in its early days within the mainstream enterprise market," Henschen said. "From an investor's perspective, there's lots of upside potential."
In terms of how TigerGraph might best use the funding it has allocated for product development, Henschen added that because of many potential users' relative inexperience with graph technology, anything that makes the technology easier to use and lowers barriers to entry would be useful.
"There's a learning curve, so anything to ease graph analysis and make it more accessible to SQL-minded analysts and the broader community of power users could only help," he said. "Beyond that, redoubling efforts to offer pre-built solutions and starting points, reference materials and resources, and community and knowledge base offerings are all good steps to growing the customer base."
