MongoDB files for IPO
Fri 22 Sep 2017
MongoDB, a privately-held database company based in New York, has filed paperwork with the Securities & Exchange Commission to begin trading stock on the NASDAQ under the symbol MDB.
The company has secured $304 million in funding to date, in nine separate series from 2008-2015. MongoDB hopes to raise an additional $100 million in the initial public offering (IPO), which will be used for business development or possibly acquisitions, according to documents filed with the SEC.
In their filing, MongoDB argued that it has a unique opportunity in the database software market, pointing out that to date, the market has been dominated by legacy database vendors. Because of this, the database market ‘is one of the few within the enterprise technology stack that has yet to be disrupted by a modern alternative, creating our opportunity.’
MongoDB has not been profitable recently, with the financials in the SEC filing revealing a $45.67 million net loss on $67.99 million in revenue for the six-month period ending July 31, 2017. However, in an interview with Fortune in May 2017, Mongo CEO Dev Ittycheria said that the company was targeting growth rather than profitability in the short term.
‘We are fortunate that our investors are patient as we target an enormous opportunity — a $36 billion to $40 billion market growing at 8% to 9% annually — that is ripe for disruption. We are taking a new approach and are the best, biggest, and growing faster than the industry.’
Earlier this year, the company’s valuation was set at $1.8 billion, when it was included on CNBC’s 2017 Disruptor 50 list, as one of the top 50 private companies ‘whose innovations are changing the world.’ The company, to date, has targeted Oracle as a primary competitor, seeing it as an example of a company which gained market share through the aforementioned legacy database technology, but whose business is ripe for disruption by a newcomer offering a more modern product.
In August, MongoDB partnered with InfoSys to offer a new mainframe offloading solution to clients looking to migrate critical functions away from legacy technology. This product, created in part by the InfoSys-MongoDB joint innovation lab in Bangalore, India, was created to offer InfoSys clients an easier way to modernize database systems.
