What is your name and what do you do?

My name is Jean Villedieu (@jvilledieu) and I am a co-founder of Linkurious, where I am in charge of sales and marketing.

Linkurious provides companies with data insights through graph visualizations powered by Neo4j, making it easy for end users, either data scientists or business analysts, to understand graph data.

We are a 5 person team based in Paris, but we have customers all over the world — mostly in the US, but also in Europe, China, Australia and South America. Some of our customers include companies that use our technology for fraud detection and medical research. One of our most notable clients is NASA.

What did you do before joining the Neo4j community?

I had met Linkurious co-founder Sebastian 3 years ago. Sebastian had created Gephi, a very successful open source, graph visualization platform. At this time, Sebastian already had the idea for Linkurious, I thought it was a cool idea so I decided to join him in starting Linkurious.

Did you find it risky to start a new company?

I found it exciting! I understood very quickly that there was an immense possibility for what we could do with the company. The world is already structured as networks it can be social links, transactions, the way ideas spread. These are networks. It’s a new way to present and think about information, which can empower you to make smarter decisions. I just saw a huge potential for this technology.

Working in the data visualization community in Neo4j, do you see any trends we should be aware of?

As companies store more and more data, and that data gets increasingly connected and sophisticated, graph technologies will be key in making sense of the data. Smart big data solutions will continue to have a high impact in the industry.

What is your favorite community project?

Linkurious.js is an open source project we support, which is free to use. Anyone can download it from Github. It’s even used for commercial projects. I’m always excited to hear about how people use it.

Just the other day, someone reached out to us. They are developing an application on GrapheneDB with Linkurious.js and they were psyched about it. That’s the beauty of having an open source project — anyone can use it and start creating something meaningful very quickly.

Connecting a social network stored as a #graph in @GrapheneDB to a customer web app using @Linkurious … in one day pic.twitter.com/iLNKAyJtHi

— Logical Graphs LLC (@logicalgraphs) December 9, 2015

What is your favorite Neo4j use case you’ve seen?

NASA uses Linkurious to explore and manage data. They have a database of lessons learned. They explore data visually, making it easy to understand what went wrong, what went well, and not repeat mistakes. So, sending stuff to space is really cool!

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) used Linkurious to analyze data from HSBC Bank and a wide range of fascinating stories came out of their research. They were able to make connections and see how some shady corrupt businesses operate, which sparked a debate on offshore banking. There was a segment on 60 minutes about it and articles on The Guardian, and Le Monde. You can read more about this here, it’s a fascinating use case of making sense of data with our product.

Any parting words or tips you’d like to share?

Well, Linkurious is compatible with GrapheneDB! So if you want to try out our service and need an instance of Neo4j, GrapheneDB is definitely an option some of our customers use. Or you can also use Linkurious.js and GrapheneDB as mentioned earlier.

Interested in Linkurious? Sign up for an online demo.