MONGODB

Dwight Merriman and Kevin Ryan had built DoubleClick, one of the most important internet advertising companies of the 1990s. They exited when it was sold to private equity in 2005, and Google bought it for $3.1 billion in a deal that closed in 2008.

In 2007, with developer Eliot Horowitz, they founded a new company called 10gen. Their original goal was to build a platform-as-a-service, essentially a complete cloud application server.

They wanted to rethink every layer of the software stack. But as they built, they kept hitting the same bottleneck: the database.

Relational databases like MySQL and Oracle were designed for structured, tabular data. Modern web applications often worked with flexible, nested, JSON-like documents such as user profiles, product catalogs, and social media posts.

Forcing those into rows and columns was slow and awkward. 10gen built MongoDB, a database designed for exactly this kind of flexible document storage.

They released it as open source in 2009. The reception was overwhelming.

Developers suffering under rigid relational schemas adopted MongoDB almost overnight. The company's pivot became obvious: forget the app server, sell the database.

In 2013 they renamed the company MongoDB Inc.

MongoDB uses the same open-core model as Elastic. The core MongoDB database is free and open source, downloadable, modifiable, and production-deployable without payment.

MongoDB makes money through MongoDB Atlas, its fully managed cloud database service that runs on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Customers pay based on storage and usage.

Atlas has gone from zero to 73% of MongoDB's total revenue in less than a decade. MongoDB also sells enterprise subscriptions for organizations that want premium security, compliance, and support features.

For the fiscal year ended January 2026 MongoDB reported about $2.46 billion in revenue, up roughly 23% year on year.

MongoDB: the original open-source document database. Stores data as JSON-like BSON documents in collections instead of rows in tables.

MongoDB Atlas: the fully managed cloud database service. Runs MongoDB on any major cloud provider.

Handles backups, scaling, and monitoring automatically. Atlas Search: full-text search built on top of Atlas, powered by Apache Lucene.

Competes directly with Elasticsearch. Atlas Vector Search: stores and queries vector embeddings for AI and machine learning workloads.

A major growth driver in the AI era. Realm, the mobile database SDK, is gone as a MongoDB product.

The company deprecated Atlas Device Sync and the Device SDKs in September 2024 and switched the sync service off on 30 September 2025, leaving Realm alive only as a local open-source database.

MongoDB's growth was text-book product-led. Open source distribution put the database on tens of thousands of developer laptops with no sales involvement.

When those developers joined companies or started projects, they brought MongoDB with them. The MEAN stack — MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node.js — became the trendy full-stack developer framework in the early 2010s, pushing MongoDB into universities, bootcamps, and startups.

The critical strategic move was Atlas. By 2016 it was clear that developers increasingly wanted managed cloud databases, not self-hosted ones.

MongoDB launched Atlas and made it extremely easy to go from a local MongoDB experiment to a production cloud deployment in minutes. That removed the biggest friction point and converted millions of free users into paying Atlas customers.

MongoDB faced two existential challenges at once. First, the NoSQL backlash.

By the mid-2010s the industry had started questioning whether NoSQL databases were really better for most use cases. Relational databases like PostgreSQL had added JSON support.

NewSQL databases offered the best of both worlds. The NoSQL-is-the-future hype had run its course.

MongoDB had to prove it was not just a trend. Second, cloud providers were repackaging its open source work without paying for it.

MongoDB switched to the Server Side Public License in October 2018 to stop the free-riding, a move that caused significant community controversy. Amazon responded in 2019 by launching Amazon DocumentDB, a MongoDB-compatible service of its own.

Flybridge Capital Partners, Union Square Ventures (seed). Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates, T.

Rowe Price, Altimeter Capital (growth rounds). Post-IPO: public market shareholders.