Philip Rathle

Chief Technology Officer at Neo4j

Speaker

Philip is the Chief Technology Officer at Neo4j, a graph intelligence platform that turns data into knowledge to power the next generation of intelligent applications. Recently recognized by the Wall Street Journal among the "Technology Decision Makers From the World's Most Influential Companies" (2025), Philip lives at the intersection of AI's business potential, its underlying ethical concerns, and its real-world deployment.

Joining Neo4j in 2012 as its first product leader, Philip helped pioneer the graph database category. Over the past decade, he has been instrumental in growing the European-founded open-source company from sub-$1M to $250M in ARR, achieving a valuation of over $2B.

Today, Philip’s work focuses on solving AI’s hallucination, black box, and judgment problems. He advocates for a dual-system approach to enterprise AI: complementing the generative "right brain" of LLMs with a logical "left brain" system of context, providing the explainability, accuracy, and privacy controls necessary for mission-critical deployment.

This technology is actively helping executives bridge the gap from prototype to production without sacrificing human agency or regulatory compliance. It currently powers 84 of the Fortune 100—including JPMorgan Chase, Walmart, Novo Nordisk, Airbus, and Uber—as well as over 500 rapidly growing AI startups. Neo4j is also a vital tool for global public service, famously used by the ICIJ to untangle the Panama Papers and by top pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the discovery of new cures.

A veteran with over two decades of experience as a CTO, founder, and product leader in the data ecosystem, Philip is a highly sought-after voice on enterprise AI strategy and has recently guest lectured at Stanford GSB, the University of Chicago, and spoke at Northwestern Kellogg.