MongoDB Gets $150 Million In A New Funding Round

MongoDB, a company of just over 320 employees until recently known as 10gen, has secured $150 million (£93.5m) in its latest financing round from investors including Salesforce.com, Intel Capital, EMC and Red Hat.

That’s more funding in a single round than any other database vendor in history. The amount of additional cash is especially impressive considering that the company attracted just $81 million (£50.5m) of venture capital since being founded in 2007.

MongoDB said it plans to invest in additional R&D and services, and expand its global operations.

Databases are cool again

According to DB-Engines, MongoDB (from ‘humongous’) is the most popular NoSQL database system in the world. NoSQL databases are not built on tables, and tend not to use structured query language to manipulate data, which allows for more flexibility and scalability. They are also considerably cheaper to use.

A $150 million round makes MongoDB one of the best-funded Big Data technology platforms on the market, and the most valuable Internet start-up headquartered in New York. According to Bloomberg, the company is now valued at $1.2 billion (£750m).

The CEO of the MongoDB, former national co-chair of technology for Obama, Max Schireson, said that the adoption of NoSQL databases has exploded over recent years.

In July, the UK’s Met Office began using MongoDB to process huge amounts of data from outer space, turning it into useful space weather forecasts. And in August, eHarmony, a dating website that claims to process a billion potential matches daily, said that adopting MongoDB instead of a decentralised SQL database had helped it find matching couples around 95 percent quicker.

“This funding will allow us to continue to invest in the technology and the global operation our customers require,” said Schiresion. “Building the product and company to bring greater agility and scalability to how organisations manage data will require a large and sustained investment. With this additional funding we will have the staying power to make these investments.”

Initially, the company will use the money to improve the core MongoDB product, as well as the Management Service, which provides monitoring, troubleshooting and backup for the database.

“With this round, MongoDB establishes itself as the database of the future, with by far the strongest product, community, team and financial backing in the industry,” said Luis Robles, venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital. “They are in a very large and competitive market, but they have all the ingredients to be big winners and we are delighted to be their business partners.”

According to recent research by Gartner, 64 percent of organisations have already invested or plan to invest in big data, but only eight percent are already running relevant projects.

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Originally published on eWeek.