Billion Dollar Unicorns: MongoDB Rises High on NoSQL Databases

According to IDC, the global Big Data market will be worth $16 billion in 2016. While the market is still dominated by SQL-based databases, there is also a rapidly growing demand for non-row and column-based databases – the NoSQL databases. Researchers at 451 Research estimate that the NoSQL database market will grow from $184 million in 2012 to over $1 billion by the year 2016. Billion Dollar Unicorn club member MongoDB is a big player in the NoSQL database market.

MongoDB’s Offerings

New York-based MongoDB is a NoSQL database management company founded in 2007 by entrepreneurs Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz. The company was initially called 10Gen and it was launched to develop an open source cloud platform. Gradually though, 10Gen found its niche in the NoSQL-based database technology and renamed themselves as MongoDB.

MongoDB aims to become the best database provider for the way applications are built and run today. They cater to the new, complex, and unstructured data types needed and created by apps and programming languages that require a data model that can deliver faster, real-time performance for app management while improving customer experience and cost management. They believe that today database platforms need to be able to scale-out and cater to the hierarchical data and irregular metadata.

MongoDB, the core product, is an open source database that can be deployed by organizations of all sizes and across all industries to give to them a dynamic data model with features such as horizontal scalability, built-in replication for high availability, aggregation framework, and Hadoop integration.

The MongoDB product lineup includes Enterprise Advanced, a platform that enables organizations to run their data center while providing them a suite of advanced software, support, certifications, and services. The MongoDB Management Service helps organizations run MongoDB in the cloud. Their Production Support offering keeps enterprise systems up and running while their engineers help the organization with production issues. The Development Support service helps organizations get up and running quickly, and the Consulting packages help organizations improve performance in production and help them scale.

MongoDB’s Financials

MongoDB’s basic database is available at an annual subscription of $2,500 per server. For additional fees, companies can purchase additional enhancements and services such as product support, on-premise management service, platform certification, and superior security features. Their Enterprise edition is available at an annual subscription of $7,500 per server and their community support services are available for free.

The company does not disclose their financials. Last year, during an interview with their CEO Max Schireson did mention that “revenue is growing faster than we planned”. Market rumors suggest that the company earned revenues of nearly $60 million in 2013.

MongoDB is venture funded and have raised $311 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 January 2015 when they raised $80 million at an undisclosed valuation. Analysts peg the company’s valuation at close to $1.6 billion. Prior to this round, they had raised $150 million in October 2013 in a round led by T. Rowe Price at a valuation of $1.2 billion, becoming the first open source NoSQL startup to join the Billion Dollar Club.

More investigation and analysis of Unicorn companies can be found in my latest Entrepreneur Journeys book, Billion Dollar Unicorns. The term Unicorn was coined in a TechCrunch article by Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures.

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Photo: Erich Ferdinand/Flickr.com.