Investing in RelationalAI: Evolving the Modern Data Stack
I’m thrilled to invest in the next generation of the modern data stack with RelationalAI (RAI). Its knowledge graph management system combines the latest advances in AI with an understanding of business processes to develop solutions that shape better decisions, improve agility, and reduce risk.
Nearly all complex business logic problems involve relationships between entities. These relationships are most efficiently (and easily) represented as graphs. Existing solutions to model and solve these problems are messy, expensive, and difficult to use. To solve this, RAI introduced a new language called Rel with a modern cloud database solution that has everything you’d expect today: elasticity, versioning, user/workload isolation, and much more.
Rel provides a declarative model for entities and relationships, layered with data integrity constraints and relational query semantics. By doing this, RAI has created perhaps one of the most unique and powerful databases in the world. Additionally, RAI provides not only graph analytics but also native ML capabilities such as classification and regression models on top.
Our investment in RelationalAI was driven by a unique opportunity to bring this incredibly innovative product to a broader developer audience. I firmly believe the time is now to bring a modern graph database to the market. As a bonus, RAI is written in Julia, which I also invested in! Using Julia as a mechanism to simultaneously create domain-specific languages and provide optimized query execution is brilliant.
Domain expertise is critical to success, and no one illustrates this better than RelationalAI’s team of top talent. CEO and Founder Molham Aref brings three decades of experience, having spent his whole career developing and implementing enterprise-grade analytic, predictive, optimization, and simulation solutions for the demand chain, supply chain, and revenue management across various industries. Molham comes from LogicBlox and Predictix, where he led the company from inception through a successful sale to Infor. On top of that, he’s just a fascinating, hilarious, and down-to-earth founder—we’ve had a number of evenings drinking wine at his home.
Supporting Molham are Product Architect and Distinguished Engineer Brad Lovering, whom I worked with directly at Splunk, and VP of Engineering Martin Bravenboer, who also joins from LogicBlox. Everything Brad touches winds up being the best software in its category; I have no doubt he will do the same with RelationalAI. Martin is an exceptional engineering leader. To hear more from him, definitely check out his appearance on Andy Pavlo’s Database Talks video series.
I’m very excited by the opportunity RelationalAI presents, and Menlo Ventures is proud to be on the team’s journey alongside Tiger Global, Madrona Venture Group, and Addition.
