Capital Backs Semantic Layer: Graphwise Secures Majority Stake as AI Agents Build New Infrastructure

On August 19, Oakley Capital announced that its Fund VI has acquired a majority stake in Graphwise, a knowledge‑graph and semantic‑data technology company formed in 2024 from the merger of Ontotext and Semantic Web Company. Graphwise serves more than 200 blue‑chip customers and reports over 30% organic ARR growth. The investment will support further commercialization, international expansion, and selective strategic acquisitions.

The traditional Semantic Layer in the BI era focuses on translating underlying tables, fields, and calculation logic into unified business concepts—ensuring consistent definitions for metrics such as Revenue, GMV, or Active Users across teams. However, AI agents require a broader semantic scope: they must understand not only how a metric is computed but also the relationships among customers, orders, products, suppliers, organizations, and documents, the governing rules, and the data provenance of each conclusion.

To meet this demand, Graphwise extends the Semantic Layer into a "Semantic Backbone" built on an enterprise knowledge graph. This backbone adds machine‑readable taxonomies and ontologies, providing shared business concepts, relationships, and context for various applications and agents.

Graphwise’s product chain addresses the limitations of large language models (LLMs) and traditional Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG). While LLMs can process language, they lack stable internal business semantics. Traditional RAG can retrieve relevant text but struggles with multi‑hop relationships, unified business rules, and data lineage—crucial for reliable agent reasoning and action.

The company’s solution consists of:

Graph Modeling : defines business logic using taxonomy and ontology.

Graph Automation : connects enterprise data sources to the model.

Semantic Analytics : enriches unstructured content with entities and metadata.

GraphDB : stores the queryable relationship network.

GraphRAG : assembles context from the governed knowledge base for agents.

This architecture moves the focus from merely "finding a relevant text snippet" to organizing enterprise objects, relationships, and rules into a structure that agents can read and reason over. The evolution is also reflected in the shift from NL2SQL to NL2Semantic2SQL and the introduction of a "business compiler" for data agents.

Graphwise’s growth and the Oakley Capital investment signal that the Semantic Layer is transitioning from a BI‑centric metric‑alignment tool to a foundational component of enterprise AI infrastructure, enabling agents to operate within a consistent business world.