“San Diego is a talent hub. There are so many companies — Qualcomm, Intuit, ServiceNow, Teradata and of course UC San Diego,” said Yu Xu, founder and CEO of TigerGraph. “We are really passionate about having a new intellectual property center in San Diego.”
TigerGraph is the latest company to expand into San Diego to tap into the engineering talent pool. Technology giants including Apple, Google, Amazon and Wal-Mart Labs which recently established footprints in the region due to strong talent pool flowing out of the local universities.
Partnering with UCSD
It will partner with UC San Diego’s Halıcıoglu Data Science Institute to attract job candidates in graph database technology, as well as analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and visualization.
“TigerGraph has evolved into a recognized graph analytics market leader. I am pleased to learn the company is opening a center of innovation in our city, which will strengthen San Diego’s ever-expanding tech ecosystem,” said Gupta.
In addition to opening a research center locally, the company will make an investment in the Halıcıoglu Data Science Institute’s Industry Partner Alliance program.
“TigerGraph has deep roots in the San Diego area, and we are delighted to be bringing new high-impact job opportunities to the city,” said Alin Deutsch, CTO of TigerGraph.“Our contribution to the HDSI is to help support data science scholarship programs for highly promising students.”
Data and Analytics
Founded in 2012, TigerGraph is a platform for advanced analytics and machine learning on connected data.
The technology is used in e-commerce, telecommunications, financial services, health care, among other industries. Notable clients include Amgen, Citrix, Intuit, Jaguar Land Rover and UnitedHealth Group.
The company also offers a hosted service, TigerGraph Cloud, with pay-as-you-go pricing, hosted either on AWS or Azure. With GraphStudio, the company also offers a graphical UI for creating data models and visually analyzing them.
“Graph has really moved into a very hot market over the last couple of years,” said Todd Blaschka, chief operating officer of TigerGraph. “Businesses developing applications for artificial intelligence and machine learning are relying on TigerGraph because it allows them to find patterns and insights in the data that they can’t through other storage methods.”
The company doesn’t have an office leased yet, but it expects to find a location and offer a hybrid workplace by the end of the third quarter. It is actively recruiting a manager to run the innovation center.
“We have a really high hiring bar, so it may take us more time to hire engineers,” said Xu. “We hope to hire 40 employees in San Diego by the end of the year.”
Xu is a Ph.D. computer science graduate at UC San Diego. Blaschka also graduated from UC San Diego. Alin Deutsch, is a professor in the university’s Computer Science and Engineering department.
Earlier this year, TigerGraph raised a $105 million Series C funding round, the largest funding investment within the graph database and analytics market. In total, it has raised more than $200 million, to date and employs roughly 170 people.