This CEO Got Bill Gates’ Attention—Now He’s Fueling AI with Memgraph’s Speedy Graph Tech

Hey there! I'm Dominik Tomicevic, the founder and CEO of Memgraph. Back in 2011, I was one of just four people worldwide to receive the Microsoft Imagine Cup Grant, personally awarded by Bill Gates, for developing game-changing technologies in data processing.

In 2016, I co-founded Memgraph, an open-source graph database designed for high-performance, real-time connected data processing. Our mission is to deliver knowledge graphs with unprecedented integration and ease of use, setting a new benchmark for knowledge graph solutions.

Today, Memgraph boasts an open-source community of over 150,000 members and serves a portfolio of Global 2000 customers, including NASA, Cedars-Sinai, and Capitec Bank.

On a personal note, I love making coffee and cocktails, and I nerd out about aviation. An ideal combo, right?

In this post, I’ll answer the ten questions for startup founders from HackerNoon Founder and CEO David Smooke.

1. What is your company in 2–5 words?

Open-source, in-memory graph database.

2. Why is now the time for your company to exist?

The world runs on connected data, but existing databases are too slow, too clunky, or too expensive for real-time. With AI, fraud detection, and recommendation systems exploding in complexity, businesses need a graph database that can handle streaming data without burning through cloud budgets. That’s where we come in.

3. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We have a team of engineers obsessed with performance, optimizations, and making complex things simple. No fluff, no bureaucracy, just a relentless focus on building a graph database that’s better than anything on the market. We come from backgrounds in engineering, mathematics, and distributed systems, so we know how to push hardware and algorithms to their limits.

4. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I would be either making cocktails on the beach and be a top barmen or be a pilot for one of the commercial aviators.

5. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?

Active deployments to see who is using us in production, query performance to see how fast we can get, developer adoption, open-source contributions, and seeing more engineers adopting Memgraph and solving their challenges.

6. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?

We offer a fast, real-time graph database for engineers building fraud detection, recommendation engines, network analysis, and AI-powered applications using Memgraph as a context engine in GraphRAG. If you need to process connected data in milliseconds, we’re your best bet. Whether you’re a startup, a bank, or a research lab, we help you analyze complex relationships without overpaying for slow, legacy graph databases.

7. What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Amazing customers and wild use cases. We’re powering AI, GraphRAG, and real-time context problems at some of the most innovative organizations out there—NASA, Cedars-Sinai, and others who can’t afford slow databases. When top-tier teams in space exploration and healthcare trust Memgraph to crunch their most complex graph problems, you know you’re onto something big.

8. Where do you think your growth will be next year?

Next year is all about building on top of what this year is all about - and that is GraphRAG and making life easier for developers building AI with graph technology. We’re going deep on merging graphs, GenAI, and automating the messy parts—like figuring out which search methods and algorithms to run for each question. That’s where our Reasoning Graph comes in. Instead of just storing data, Memgraph will actively help decide how to answer, applying context, constraints, and the right retrieval strategies on the fly.

9. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.

Our first customer is a Swiss company named Saporo. They use graphs to reduce identity attack surface by finding and addressing the most dangerous access (mis)configurations. We have several other customers dealing with cybersecurity and althought last year was very successful for us, as Graph RAG use cases are becoming more popular we anticipate further revenue growth.

10. What’s your biggest threat?

Our biggest challenge is also our biggest opportunity—the adoption of graph technology and awareness about your data being inherently interconnected which represents an enormous opportunity. While many organizations are still unfamiliar with graph technology, those who explore it quickly see its transformative power in analyzing complex relationships and making smarter business decisions. This is why education and advocacy are at the heart of what we do. By helping more people understand the value of connected data, we are not just overcoming obstacles—we are shaping the future of data-driven decision-making and empowering businesses to unlock new possibilities.

This startup founder interview template is based on HackerNoon Founder & CEO David Smooke’s ten questions for startup founders.