Oakley Capital has acquired a majority stake in Graphwise, an enterprise AI knowledge platform provider serving more than 200 blue-chip customers, as the private equity firm looks to accelerate the company’s international expansion and capitalize on growing demand for trusted data infrastructure supporting artificial intelligence.
The investment is being made through Oakley Capital Fund VI. Oakley is acquiring its majority position from an investment consortium led by Integral Capital Group that also includes PortfoLion Capital Partners, Carpathian Partners and the EBRD. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Graphwise’s founders and management team will continue leading the business following the transaction. Oakley plans to work closely with President and co-founder Atanas Kiryakov to develop the company’s commercial capabilities and go-to-market strategy while expanding its presence in key international markets.
Strategic acquisitions are also expected to form part of Graphwise’s next phase. Oakley and the management team intend to pursue selective acquisitions in what they describe as a highly fragmented market, creating an opportunity to broaden Graphwise’s technology and commercial footprint.
Graphwise provides knowledge graph and semantic technology designed to help enterprises organize large, complex and diverse datasets in ways that can improve the accuracy, governance and auditability of AI, search and analytics systems.
Its technology organizes enterprise information into knowledge graphs that enrich data with context, meaning and relationships. Graphwise describes this infrastructure as a “semantic backbone” that can provide shared reference knowledge to human experts, AI agents and enterprise IT systems.
The approach extends beyond conventional semantic layers, which are generally designed to establish consistent definitions for analytics. Graphwise’s semantic backbone is intended to operate across the enterprise and support multiple applications through shared knowledge, accurate retrieval and reasoning, and stronger data and AI governance.
That infrastructure is becoming increasingly relevant as organizations deploy large language models and AI agents against proprietary enterprise information. While LLMs can process and generate language effectively, their outputs can struggle with factual consistency and explaining the basis for particular conclusions.
Graphwise seeks to address those limitations by giving AI systems a verified layer of enterprise facts from which they can retrieve information and reason. The company sees particular demand in regulated and data-intensive sectors including financial services, life sciences and the public sector, where compliance, auditability and governance requirements can make uncontrolled AI deployments difficult.
The technology also addresses the rising computing costs associated with enterprise AI. Rather than sending large volumes of unstructured information into an AI model, Graphwise’s semantic context and GraphRAG engine retrieve the specific knowledge required for a particular task.
Graphwise said customers have reported substantially lower token consumption while simultaneously improving answer accuracy.
Industry research cited by Graphwise points to semantics becoming an increasingly important part of AI infrastructure. Gartner projects that prioritizing semantics in AI-ready data could increase agentic AI accuracy by up to 80% while reducing costs by as much as 60% by 2027.
Gartner also expects 40% of enterprises to have adopted GraphRAG by 2029 as companies seek to improve the accuracy and reasoning capabilities of large language models.
Graphwise was formed in 2024 through the merger of two semantic technology companies. Ontotext was founded in Sofia in 2000 by Kiryakov, while Vienna-based Semantic Web Company was founded in 2004 by Andreas Blumauer and Martin Kaltenböck.
Since the combination, Graphwise has built a global presence across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The company said it has generated historical organic annual recurring revenue growth of more than 30% per year as enterprise spending on AI creates additional demand for knowledge graph and semantic infrastructure.
Graphwise specializes in Resource Description Framework, or RDF, knowledge graphs and semantic technologies. The platform is positioned around helping enterprises build a trusted information foundation beneath AI applications rather than depending solely on the information contained within individual AI models.
Oakley’s investment will give Graphwise additional resources to scale that platform, expand commercially and potentially consolidate parts of the broader knowledge graph and semantic technology market.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI is changing how every organization operates which makes trusted, well-governed data more important now than ever. Graphwise has built an exceptional platform to solve that challenge and has already demonstrated impressive growth. We look forward to partnering with Atanas and the team to help the business build on that momentum and realize its full potential.”
Peter Dubens, Founder And Managing Partner Of Oakley Capital
“We are excited for this new partnership with Oakley, as their team understands both our technology and our ambition. Oakley has an outstanding track record of transforming founder-led software businesses into unicorns. Together, we look forward to expanding our platform and supporting more organizations to adopt AI with confidence.”
Atanas Kiryakov, President And Co-Founder Of Graphwise
