MongoDB Aims For $10 Billion Valuation

The worldwide database market is estimated to be worth $30 billion and is dominated by Oracle. But there is a fast growing start-up that is eyeing the market and aspires to compete directly with the tech giant. MongoDB has defied the database row and column structure to deliver a product that “developers love.” As Oracle’s legacy relational database structure struggles to adapt to the growing availability of unstructured databases, MongoDB is quietly and rapidly expanding their market presence.

MongoDB’s Offerings

MongoDB is a document-based database management company that was founded in 2007 as 10Gen by entrepreneurs Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz. The company was initially launched to develop an open-source cloud platform. With its NoSQL based database technology, MongoDB, gained a much wider market share, the company changed its name to MongoDB.

MongoDB aims to be the best database provider for the way applications are built and run today. They believe that the rapid growth of data is leading to the development of new, complex and unstructured data types, new apps and new programming languages that require a data model that can deliver faster, real-time performance for app management while improving customer experience and improving cost management. Thus, MongoDB plans to deliver a highly scalable and agile database solution catering to this growing demand of Big Data and new age apps that count on the NoSQL movement. The idea behind MongoDB was born when the founders, while working together at DoubleClick, got frustrated with the need for developing highly customized database solutions.

Their core product, MongoDB, is an open-source database that can be deployed by organizations of all sizes and across all industries. It provides a dynamic data model with features such as horizontal scalability, built-in replication for high availability, aggregation framework, and Hadoop integration. The basic database is available at an annual subscription of $2,500 per server. Additional enhancements such as product support, on-premise management service, platform certification and superior security features are available at a premium. The MongoDB Enterprise edition is priced at an annual subscription of $7,500 per server. Their community support services are available for free.

The company claims that their biggest advantage lies in their ability to deliver a database design at a “10 to 1 improvement” thus completing big projects at a faster rate and at a significantly low cost. They have a customer base of over 600 organizations with big names like Met Life and Goldman Sachs in their portfolio. Their technology is able to offer to their clients like MetLife products a 360 degree view of their customers by consolidating data on policy details and transactions from over 70 corporate systems that earlier did not connect with each other.

MongoDB’s Financials

MongoDB has kept the details of its finances under wraps. But it is no secret that they are growing at a rapid pace. The company’s headcount has grown from 20 employees in 2011 to an estimated 350-400 at the end of 2013. They remain venture funded and have raised $231 million from investors including Union Square Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, Red Hat, Intel Capital, In-Q-Tel, New Enterprise Associates, EMC, Salesforce, Fidelity Investments, T. Rowe Price, and Altimeter Capital. Their last round of funding was held in October last year when they raised $150 million in a round led by T. Rowe Price at a valuation of $1.2 billion. They became the first open-source NoSQL start-up to join the billion dollar club. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Their management is convinced that with MongoDB, they have a product that will help them raise the valuation to $10-$20 billion.