While every new company or a start-up hopes for a lucky break, the day the Panama Papers made headlines around the world, the Swedish company Neo Technology found out it was getting one such break.

In order to make sense of 11.5 million documents, including emails, images and spreadsheets, leaked from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, journalists with access to the vast trove of data used the firm’s open-source database for help.

Helping find names of the rich and powerful and linking them to offshore accounts, Neo Technology’s “graph database” literally connected the dots for them.

“I was blown away,” co-founder and CEO Emil Eifrem said while referring to the moment he discovered, just hours before publication, that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) had been using his product for the Panama Papers.

“It’s such a sweet spot for our technology, that we have a very stark example. It’s been for a long time sexy for geeks. But now all of a sudden we can talk about it even to other people,” the 37-year-old Swede, who released his first free software project at just 16, told Reuters.

Revelations from the huge loads of data and information have shone a light on the financial schemes of the world’s elites and caused public outrage after an ICIJ team had worked in secret for an entire year on the documents covering a period of almost four decades.

Imagine a spider web of lines — help reveal all the connections between those names and documents while most databases use tabular searches which can find all the documents in which a name is mentioned, graph databases.

“You may have a prime minister connected to an address, and at that address someone else is living there who is connected to an account which is suspicious in some way. That’s 1,2,3,4 hops which is impossible to do with any other technology,” said Eifrem, speaking from Silicon Valley amid morning rush hour traffic.

Neo Technology’s database had been key to its investigation of the Panama Papers, the ICIJ’s data and research unit editor Mar Cabra said in a statement.

Science news website Live Science has said it would take more than 41 years of nonstop operation to print out on an office laser printer while describing the hugeness of the 2.6 terabyte data drop.

To find news leads in the mountain of data, technology was essential. Software that made millions of the scanned documents text-searchable was supplied by, Nuix Pty Ltd, a little-known Australian developer.

Neo Technology is now headquartered in San Mateo, California and employs about 120 people and was founded in 2007 in the southern Swedish city of Malmo. It currently has around 200 paying clients, ranging from Walmart and eBay to banking groups like UBS.

Online retailers use its technology to give customers personal recommendations based on their own purchases and those of others and is particularly popular with companies in this sector. It is used for identity and access management and fraud prevention in banking.

(Adapted from Reuters)