Neo4j was developed as an in-house technology for a small yet insanely great ;) software company in Sweden called Windh Technologies. Windh develops and sells enterprise content management services, mainly for the public sector and the defense industry. Its development staff had been banging their head against the relational wall for some years when they finally started to just build a product to fix the problem once and for all.
So Neo4j was first conceived in 2000. A prototype was developed in association with the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay over the course of a year. In early 2002, the current iteration of Neo4j was developed and roughly a year later, the first applications on top of Neo were put in production.
Four years later, in late 2006, the Neo4j software was spun off into a separate company, Neo Technology, and Neo4j was released as free software under a dual license model.
Read information on the current team on the team page.
Updated: Feb 16, 2010