10gen, creators of the NoSQL database product MongoDB, today announced the finalization of Series E funding totaling $42 million. The capital raise was led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures. The capital will be used to enhance product development as well as to support “its rapidly growing community and user base worldwide.” Today’s announcement brings 10gen’s net funding to $73 million over the course of five rounds.
10gen’s funding raise means that the battle for NoSQL market share is likely to heat up as MongoDB attempts to consolidate its position as the leading distributor of a NoSQL database product. 10gen claims that “MongoDB is the dominant NoSQL database, with top enterprises in Telecommunications, Financial Services, Media, Government and Technology standardizing on MongoDB.” Moreover, the company boasts growth of 50% every quarter for the last five quarters. Meanwhile, the 10gen team has grown 400% since January 2011 with a majority of its 130 employees still housed within the technology and product development departments.
10gen’s CEO Dwight Merriman remarked that one of the company’s goals was to disrupt the database landscape with MongoDB:
“We want to change the database market, to make MongoDB the best way for companies to build new applications. 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.”
As Merrimen points out, scalability represents one of the key selling points of 10gen although, ironically, scalability constitutes one of the attributes along which MongoDB intends to improve with its most recent capital raise, as reported by GigaOm. Enterprise customers of 10gen that use MongoDB include Craigslist, Disney, Foursquare and The New York Times. Craigslist uses MongoDB to archive records that number in the billions.
MongoDB is an open source NoSQL database product with commercial support and licensing options. The free version of the product is available through a GNU Affero General Public License. MongoDB competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services’s DynamoDB, CouchBase, Redis, Riak and Neo4j in addition to DataStax’s commercialized variant of Apache Cassandra NoSQL. 10gen’s recent capital raise may strongly position the company for acquisition by HP, IBM or Dell, all of which could well be interested in a robust NoSQL database, or otherwise an IPO.
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