News

MongoDB Training Company Receives a Funding Increase of $42 Million

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• May 30, 2012

10gen announced this week that it has received a cash infusion of $42 million. The company, which offers training and support for the open-source NoSQL-based MongoDB database, received the monetary support from a conglomerate of investors.

Leading the latest round of venture funding was New Enterprise Associates and backed by existing investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures. In total 10Gen has raised $73 million.  The investment is the latest sign that MongoDB is gaining momentum as a repository for emerging big data applications.

Former DoubleClick founder and CTO Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz, also an engineer coming from DoubleClick, which is now part of Google, led development of MongoDB and subsequently launched 10gen.

MongoDB is popular because, according to users,  it is better suited than traditional relational databases for handling documents and other unstructured data types. Unlike relational databases designed to store data in tables and rows, MongoDB stores JSON-type content with dynamic schemas. MongoDB aims to "bridge the gap between key-value stores (which are fast and scalable) and relational databases (which have rich functionality)," according to a FAQ on the 10gen site.

"We want to change the database market, to make MongoDB the best way for companies to build new applications," said Merriman, who is now10gen's CEO. "Our goal is to give tech teams not only a database that scales to any big data level required but also helps developers be productive and more nimble. That has been the vision of the MongoDB open source community and we want to continue to help make that happen."

MongoDB databases are frequently stored on cloud-based infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services EC2 and Microsoft's Windows Azure, among other services. 10gen said it plans to invest the funding in further development of Mongo DB and the cloud-based MongoDB Monitoring Service as well extending support for its customers and community of developers.