Dwight Merriman, Eliot Horowitz, and Kevin Ryan – veterans of the online advertising company Doubleclick that was acquired by Google – quickly learned the limitations of relational databases when scaling the company to serve more than 400,000 ads per second. Based on their experience, they believed they could create a more scalable and flexible solution for storing and managing data at high volume and velocity to help developers become more productive and improve business operations. The result was the founding of the company now known as MongoDB (formerly 10gen) in 2007.
At this same time, cloud computing was emerging as a new business model with the promise of virtually unlimited scalability, pay-as-you-go pricing, and no longer needing to self-manage IT infrastructure. Merriman and Horowitz saw an opportunity to take advantage of this new model to build a developer-centric platform. Their breakthrough came when they realized that a document-based data model with an open development approach could disrupt the massive database market. This new innovation gave developers a better way to manage and interact with data in a natural and flexible way to meet every type of workload demand—enabling them to quickly build their next big idea without the constraints of legacy databases.
Together with Ryan, an experienced entrepreneur, they formed a company called 10Gen and launched MongoDB (short for "humongous database") in 2009 with the goal of creating a next-generation data platform that could process large volumes of unstructured data, easily scale, and be flexible enough to meet the demands of modern applications. Keeping developers top of mind, the team spent an inordinate amount of time learning and immersing themselves in the challenges developers face. It used these insights to fine-tune MongoDB’s database engine – resulting in MongoDB quickly gaining traction in the tech industry and reimagining how developers build applications. The product was so successful that the company renamed itself MongoDB in 2013.
In 2014, Dev Ittycheria joined as President and CEO to grow the business. Under Dev’s leadership, MongoDB has released innovative products such as MongoDB Atlas, acquired thousands of customers, rapidly expanded operations around the world, grown its business faster, and delivered better financial performance than any comparable company in its sector.
The needs of developers have always served as the company’s North Star, and MongoDB Atlas now integrates all of the data services needed to build modern applications via a unified experience into a complete developer data platform – realizing much of the founders’ original vision of offering a service to quickly build and scale applications by consolidating different types of data and workloads on-premises or in a customer’s preferred cloud provider. As time goes on too, many continue to try and emulate MongoDB’s flexible document model - including every major cloud provider - but the advanced capabilities in Atlas and community loyalty to MongoDB continues to grow and remains unmatched.
Research estimates that 750 million applications will be built in the next few years and developers are now taking center stage in a world where the union of software and data usually determines whether a business falters or thrives. Built by developers for developers, MongoDB is now one of the fastest-growing public database companies in the world. It has invested more than $1B in research and development and forged partnerships with all the major cloud and technology companies around the world. The MongoDB database has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times, with millions of developers enrolling in MongoDB University. Industry analysts rank MongoDB as a category leader. The most sophisticated organizations, from the world’s largest companies to cutting-edge startups use MongoDB every day to transform their companies, innovate new experiences, and disrupt their industries. Developers continue to demand MongoDB as one of the most loved and desired must-have technology platforms in their toolkit.