MongoDB Raises $150 Million at $1.2 Billion Valuation

[venus]

Well let me be the first to say that I think that is an absolutely fucking crazy valuation and that MongoDB are either nuts or disingenuous for signing up for it.

I would be astounded - astounded - if MongoDB generate even a tenth of that, just in revenue, ever.

One point two billion dollars. You have got to be kidding me. You have got to be fucking kidding me.

[pc]

I hate to be That Guy, but I think this demands a bit more rigor. $1.2B is certainly a big number, but let's unpack what it means. Do you think it's impossible that MongoDB gets to $100M of net income? For a company that sells to the enterprise and whose product has significant adoption, that definitely doesn't sound implausible to me.

Given their financials and growth figures, how would you value MongoDB?

[brugidou]

As an engineer directly involved in a company working on one of the biggest mongodb deployments, i also believe that this is crazy because the technology truly sucks outside of a very narrow use case (prototyping, no shard).

However they market it so much and they accept very flexible deals with enterprises, in combination with the easy-to-bootstrap for the VP/Manager/CTO, they can probably sell a lot of it.

[brudgers]

The investors are putting up capital based on what they think Mongo will be worth at some future date after they have used the new capital to fuel growth. It's a bet, not an accounting exercise, and the bet is based on what might happen five or more years down the road.

The valuation is really irrelevant because it is a side effect of the negotiations between a syndicate with $150 million to invest and a company looking to raise money.

If the investors had negotiated less successfully, the valuation would be higher. If the company had been less successful, the valuation would have been lower.

But in either of those scenarios there would be little difference in their returns if Mongo goes bust, and little difference if they become Oracle sized in the next ten years.

[Confusion]

Fortunately there is no startup bubble.

[codex]

I'd agree. Open source businesses have never been able to extract the value that closed source business can. Imagine if Oracle made their database open source; a dozen repackages would pop up, and Oracle's revenue would drop to a fraction of its former level.

[rpedela]

Is MongoDB going to fix their scalability, performance, JOIN, and data type support problems with the money? Seems like a bad investment to me since a lot of developers are starting to move away from it because of those problems and others.

[throwaway8199]

MongoDB accounted for ~90% of my startup's downtime in its first year of existence. We switched away to MYSQL and suddenly scalability concerns retreated into the future.

[joelhaasnoot]

For every developer you hear that has problems with Mongo, there are probably 5 that are fine with certain downsides.

[omni]

Can you point me to an article that explains why you would want JOINs in a NoSQL database to begin with? I thought the entire point was to denormalize your data. I keep seeing this point brought up, but it reads to me like a misguided complaint stemming from misunderstanding how to apply the tech.

[throwawayyyz]

I'm pretty sure their download numbers say otherwise. One or two HN threads complaining about MongoDB every month are not a good indicator for their future success.

[yapcguy]

How does CouchDB compare? What are the latest thoughts on this?

[moox]

If you're having issues with scaling and performance, you're most likely using MongoDB the wrong way or for the wrong reasons.

[ddorian43]

what are the data type problems?

[sandGorgon]

nobody ever got fired for choosing:

1. Oracle

2. SQL Server

3. MongoDB

[untog]

$1.2bn seems utterly mad to me, but kudos to them for getting it.

[tolitius]

Ok. Time to change how the hype and good marketing drive mediocre products, with average people behind it, to silly valuations.

So here it comes. It is only a VALUE if WE say it is. So here is what I say.

I value

    * Redis      @ $4.5B
    * Datomic    @ $4.5B
    * Riak       @ $3.2B
    * Hazelcast  @ $3.0B
    * HBase      @ $2.5B
    * Spanner    @ $2.1B
    * Neo4j      @ $2.0B
    * MongoDB    @ N/A

Congratulations to MongoDB sales and marketing team (really!). It is a tough job to sell a trojan horse to masses.

[junto]

Cool, time to make MongoDb web scale! :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

[tcgv]

I have been using MongoDB every once in a while and I think it is great. The C# driver has linq support which increases productivity to the roof. However, the feature I miss the most while using MongoDB is multi document transaction support. Their site provides a workaround[1] that from my point of view is not worth implementing. Instead I prefer to switch back to traditional SQL databases in those situations.

[1] http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/perform-two-phase-co...

[sethbannon]

This is more great news for the NYC startup ecosystem.

[alexholehouse]

Slightly off topic, but at what point does "big data" just become data?

According to wikipedia (which is in line with how I think about big data) "Big data is the term for a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. "

However, as "big data" becomes more mainstream and more tools/services exist to accommodate data at the peta/exobyte scale does that whole definition stop being relevant for kinds of data we're talking about?

[mcphilip]

Working in the risk analytics space, "Big Data" seems to be marketing speak for "you can dump all sorts of loosely structured data into this big bucket and our tools will help you find meaningful trends in it." I've yet to see an installation approaching anything near 300GB, so I think of big data as the new sexier label to put on ad hoc data mining applications.

[CmonDev]

It's just a buzzword now. "Let's use cloud to do big data analysis to proactively synergise our core competencies".

[cbsmith]

One rule of thumb I've had for people is, "if you can fit it in one computer, it is definitely not big data".

[TallGuyShort]

I actually first heard the term used in what has turned out be to be a very unusual sense. "Big Data" is like "Big Oil" - it's a term for industries that get their economic clout from the value of their data. Google, for instance, is "Big Data" because it's able to offer the advertising platforms and spam filtering services that it does because of the data it's extracting value from.

[Keyframe]

CmonDev put it nicely. Buzzword. Same when you hear, most of the time, how someone is leveraging Hadoop for whatever.

There are various definitions of what is big data. I like to think of it as whenever the only way to deal with your data is by doing full table scans, then we're in same domain of thinking of big data.

[kubiiii]

I guess so and 16 MB was certainely considered too large and complex to process it with traditionel data processing applications a few decades ago.

[jameshart]

I wonder to what extent the AGPL license actually facilitates the creation of a commercial business based on the software; large online service customers who would be willing to use even GPL software without paying anybody for it might be more likely to opt to negotiate a commercial license for AGPL code.

If that is the case, though, and their revenue model is based on providing non-AGPL access to MongoDB, doesn't that rather put MongoDB in the position of commercially exploiting the work of developers who contribute their code under the expectation that it will be freely shared under AGPL?

[mason55]

> doesn't that rather put MongoDB in the position of commercially exploiting the work of developers who contribute their code under the expectation that it will be freely shared under AGPL?

While the MongoDB product is open source and licensed under the AGPL, they very rarely accept outside contributions. A vast majority of the product was built by 10gen/MongoDB, so this is less of an issue than it would be for something like Postgres.

[bitdiddle]

I don't quite follow, in that all dual-licensed business models seem to be based on this exploitation? What's different about AGPL?

[bane]

I bet In-Q-Tel is very happy with this. Between MongoDB and Palantir their recent investments have been doing really well.

[mkhalil]

Whenever I see something like this, I can't help but think this is just a business deal. Nothing to do with technology. Rich business men are going to get richer because they can get away with over-valuing technology and tricking their non-tech savy investors into thinking this will make them a buttload. Some sort of quasi-pyramid scheme.

[geertj]

Congrats to MongoDB. But for me they became pretty much irrelevant after PostgreSQL 9.1 added a JSON datatype.

[zshprompt]

Yesterday I was just talking to some folks about how they lock on the DATABASE for a transaction. Yey.

[teh_klev]

It's a shame they didn't think about the name a bit longer. In the UK "Mongo" is a fairly disparaging term and I find it hard to pitch MongoDB to customers because of this.

[bborud]

Good, now they only need to deliver a database :)

[mratzloff]

> MongoDB ... now has about 600 customers, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and MetLife Inc.

I wonder what services they sell to scale it to those customers. It sure doesn't come that way out of the box. Any Mongo customers here?

[nasalgoat]

I'm a Mongo customer. Their customer service is probably the best I've had from an Enterprise vendor in terms of response time and general quality.

Unfortunately, the product itself is so poor I am forced to get the support, and even then I've managed to stump their senior engineers quite a bit with my "impossible" problems.

[gregwebs]

Please use this money to buy the TokuTek fork. I always expected the storage layer to have made much greater progress by now.

[frostnovazzz]

A month ago I was contacted by a recruiter about some engineering opportunity. I was surprised to know that MongoDB gives me the feeling of Tech company like G or FB. I always thought of MongoDB as kind of an open source product. I started to learn how it operate as a business. I think this is a sign that enterprise-targeted business are rising, and there will be more and more of this kind of start ups in the future.

[mbesto]

Curious - what systems has MongoDB replaced in enterprise companies (like Goldman Sachs, etc)?

[jzwinck]

I think a common answer would be "text files." And of course, grep and awk.

[pacofvf]

Mainly in-house made no-sql databases.

[threeseed]

I've worked at enterprise companies with MongoDB deployments.

It is replacing Oracle databases which everybody is sick of. And given that most companies aren't clustering it is pretty much a simple drop in and replace scenario.

[claudiowilson]

I don't think MongoDB should be replacing systems, it should rather be used as a data store for things that otherwise wouldn't be stored because of the high throughput needs, but aren't necessarily critical data.

[alphadevx]

I know they're hiring like crazy in their new office in Dublin. Big growth spurt, massive cash injection, interesting to see if they become the first big "enterprisey" NoSQL provider.