RelationalAI, a Berkeley, Calif.-based startup building “knowledge graphs” for intelligent data apps, raised $122 million in a Series B round led by Tiger Global.
The company, backed by Seattle firm Madrona Venture Group (which led the Series A round), also added former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia to its board.
Founded in 2017, RelationalAI aims to help companies accelerate development of intelligent data apps by providing “knowledge graphs,” which are a databases that model business concepts, or “a natural representation of important relationships,” according to its site. They are meant to be used with modern cloud data platforms such as data warehouses and data lakes.
Muglia said knowledge graphs promise “to integrate complex business logic and machine learning into the database itself.”
“This new generation of database systems support SQL and augments it with a set of open, published relational algorithms pioneered by RelationalAI,” he said in a statement.
Muglia spent five years at Snowflake before stepping down in 2019. He previously spent 23 years at Microsoft.
S. “Soma” Somasegar, managing director at Madrona — and a former colleague of Muglia at Microsoft — said RelationalAI will “revolutionize how data-driven intelligent applications are created.”
“Its platform is fundamental to how next-generation data-driven intelligent applications will be built,” he said in a blog post.
The company is led by Molham Aref, former CEO at Predictix and LogicBlox. It is based in the Bay Area but three of the company’s execs — CFO Rafael Gonzalez Caloni; VP of Engineering Martin Bravenboer; VP of Product John Macintyre — are based in Seattle. The startup employs around 100 people.
Addition and Menlo Ventures also participated in the Series B round.