Dgraph Labs

About Dgraph Labs

Dgraph Labs provides a horizontally scalable, distributed graph database designed for high-performance, real-time applications. The company was founded in 2015 by Manish Rai Jain, a former Google engineer who led a project to build a backend graph system for web search. This experience directly inspired the creation of Dgraph, which was engineered from the ground up to offer the scale and throughput of systems used at large tech companies to a broader market.

The core product, Dgraph, is an open-source, native graph database written in the Go programming language. Unlike some competitors that function as a graph layer on top of other databases, Dgraph controls its own data storage, which optimizes for query performance and reduces network calls in a distributed environment. It supports ACID transactions, consistent replication, and linearizable reads, ensuring data integrity and reliability for enterprise use cases. The database is particularly suited for unifying disparate data silos, enabling organizations to run complex queries across multiple datasets for applications like customer 360, knowledge graphs, real-time analytics, and fraud detection.

Dgraph Labs operates on an open-core business model. The core database is free and open-source under the Apache 2.0 license, while revenue is generated through Dgraph Enterprise and a managed cloud service, Dgraph Cloud. The enterprise version provides additional features such as enhanced security and support, which are paid for by organizations. Dgraph Cloud, launched in 2020, offers a fully managed, hosted GraphQL database service on major cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure, allowing developers to focus on application building rather than infrastructure management. In late 2023, Dgraph Labs was acquired by Hypermode, a move intended to ensure the continued development of Dgraph and integrate its technology into Hypermode's AI-focused platform.