Oakley Capital Invests in Graphwise to Help Enterprises Ground AI in Trusted Knowledge

The investment will accelerate the growth of the leading provider of AI knowledge platforms as companies seek to scale up AI cost-effectively

NEW YORK, Aug. 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Graphwise, the leading Graph AI provider, today announced that Oakley Capital ("Oakley"), a leading European mid-market private equity investor, has acquired a majority stake in the company through its Fund VI to help businesses anchor AI using verified enterprise data. Oakley will acquire a majority stake from an investment consortium led by Integral Capital Group, including PortfoLion Capital Partners, Carpathian Partners, and the EBRD. Financial terms of the transaction are not disclosed.

The investor will partner with Graphwise's founders and management team who will continue to lead the business to support its commercial expansion and strengthen its market-leading position. Oakley will work closely with President Atanas Kiryakov to develop its commercial capabilities and go-to-market strategy, strengthening its footprint in key international markets, and pursuing selective strategic acquisitions in a highly fragmented market.

"AI is changing how every organization operates which makes trusted, well-governed data more important now than ever," said Peter Dubens, Founder and Managing Partner of Oakley Capital. "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."

Graphwise is already trusted by more than 200 blue-chip customers, helping them deal with large and diverse datasets that will improve the accuracy and auditability of their enterprise AI, search and analytics systems. Graphwise organizes enterprise data in a type of database called a knowledge graph that enriches data with context, meaning, and connections to form a semantic backbone for human experts, AI agents, and IT systems. While the so-called "semantic layers" represent a translation tool built for analytic consistency, semantic backbone is an enterprise-wide infrastructure serving multiple applications with shared reference knowledge, accurate retrieval and reasoning, data and AI governance.

This is increasingly viewed as critical infrastructure technology, as it improves the speed and performance of AI workflows, while reducing costs and dependency on particular models and platforms.

The value of AI depends on the quality and reliability of the data behind it. Large language models ("LLMs") are strong at processing language but have limitations, including factual consistency and explaining how they arrived at conclusions. Graphwise's semantic backbone addresses these limitations by giving LLMs a reliable layer of facts to retrieve from and reason over. This is particularly valuable in regulated, data-intensive sectors such as financial services, life sciences and the public sector, where compliance, auditability and data governance are essential.

Cost is also a growing problem across the AI industry — and Gartner traces it to the same root cause as the accuracy problem: a lack of semantic context. Speaking at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in May 2026, Distinguished VP Analyst Rita Sallam said semantic coherence "will become a cost-control and trust strategy, not a nice-to-have," and Gartner projects that prioritizing semantics in AI-ready data could boost agentic AI accuracy by up to 80% while cutting costs by up to 60% by 2027. Separately, Gartner expects 40% of enterprises to have adopted GraphRAG by 2029 to improve LLM accuracy and reasoning — the exact approach behind Graphwise's semantic backbone and retrieval technology.

Graphwise's semantic context and GraphRAG engine solve both problems by retrieving the specific knowledge an AI model needs. Instead of flooding AI with unstructured context, customers report a substantially lower token consumption alongside higher answer accuracy.

The company was formed in 2024 through the merger of two pioneers in semantic technologies: Ontotext, founded in Sofia in 2000 by Atanas Kiryakov, and Vienna-based Semantic Web Company, founded in 2004 by Andreas Blumauer and Martin Kaltenböck. Since then, Graphwise has established itself as the global leader in RDF ("Resource Description Framework") knowledge graph and semantic layer technology and has delivered historical organic ARR growth of over 30% a year, benefitting from the AI tailwind.

"We are excited for this new partnership with Oakley, as their team understands both our technology and our ambition," said Atanas Kiryakov, President and Co-founder of Graphwise. "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." 

About Graphwise

Graphwise enables organizations to unlock ROI for enterprise AI by delivering the most comprehensive and trusted industry solution in the fields of knowledge graphs and neuro-symbolic AI technologies. As enterprises pour millions into AI investment, Graphwise delivers the critical semantic backbone infrastructure that ensures that enterprises can realize the technology's full potential, is trusted, and can be implemented at scale. Graphwise, serves over 200 blue-chip customers from offices located across North America, Europe, and APAC. To learn more, visit www.graphwise.ai or follow on LinkedIn. 

About Oakley Capital

Oakley Capital was founded 20 years ago to be the partner of choice for exceptional founders and entrepreneurs. We back private, pan-European businesses with an enterprise value from €100m to €1bln+, acquiring control or co-control stakes. We have a diverse team of over 200 professionals working across five locations, including London, Munich, Milan, Madrid, and Luxembourg, offering us genuine European reach and local cultural expertise. Our unique origination capabilities help us unearth attractive opportunities across our four core sectors: Technology, Business Services, Digital Consumer and Education. We focus on building long-lasting, repeat partnerships with exceptional founders, many of whom go on to invest in our funds.

Media Contacts

For Graphwise
Chris McCoin or Richard Smith
McCoin & Smith Communications Inc. 
chris@mccoinsmith.com or rick@mccoinsmith.com