Graph database maker Neo4j Inc. said today it has raised an $80 million late-stage funding round, doubling the company’s total venture capital investment to $160 million and making it the best-funded startup in its market.

The company said it will use the funds to hike investment in its flagship platform to “support popular use cases, including graph-enabled artificial intelligence and machine learning systems.” The Series E round was led by One Peak Partners and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and included existing investors Creandum AB, Eight Roads Ventures and Greenbridge Partners LLC. The company wouldn’t estimate its valuation.

Neo4j is widely credited with spurring the surging interest in graph database technology, which takes a radically different approach to storing and navigating information then traditional data management engines.

Graph databases excel at representing complex relationships in ways that can be quickly and easily navigated to discover correlations, such as how many school friends who are not yet connected to you live in Europe and are already connected to five of your closest friends. The technology is commonly used in applications that require navigating many loosely related elements, such as fraud detection and recommendation engines.

Neo4j CEO Emil Eifrem

Most notably, Neo4j’s technology was extensively used in the Paradise Papers, a global investigative journalism project that had reporters sifting through more than 13 million documents to uncover offshore activities of prominent people and organizations.

The graph database market is expected to reach $2.4 billion in annual revenue by 2023, growing at a 24 percent annual rate, according to MarketsandMarkets Research Private Ltd. Competitors include TigerGraph Inc., Callidus Software Inc., ArangoDB GmbH and DataStax Inc. Interest in the market has heated up over the past year with the entry of Amazon Web Services Inc. in late 2017 and Microsoft Corp. early this year.

“The graph paradigm shift is fully underway, and the demand for graph technology is accelerating faster than ever before,” founder and Chief Executive Emil Eifrem wrote on his blog.

Neo4j was founded in 2007 to commercialize the open-source version of the graph engine, which was released in 2003. The Community Edition is licensed under the free GNU General Public License while the Neo4j Enterprise Edition is licensed under a Neo4j commercial license.

The company claims to have more than 300 commercial customers, including UBS Group AG, Walmart Inc., Volvo AB and AstraZeneca Plc. It said 76 percent of Fortune 100 companies have adopted or piloted its product, and counts 20 of the top 25 financial firms and seven of the 10 top retailers as customers. The company “continues to dominate the graph database market,” Forrester Research Inc. analyst Noel Yuhanna wrote in a market overview published last year.

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