MongoDB at Citi’s Conference: Strategic Moves for Growth

On Wednesday, 03 September 2025, MongoDB (NASDAQ:MDB) participated in Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference. The company highlighted its recent strong quarter, driven by strategic shifts and internal improvements. While the reacceleration of Atlas growth and AI opportunities were positive, challenges remain in a competitive landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Atlas growth reaccelerated to 29%, driven by internal execution improvements.
• MongoDB is shifting its go-to-market strategy upmarket to target larger customers.
• The company is investing in AI initiatives, including the Voyage acquisition for AI applications.
• MongoDB remains optimistic about its market position and future growth prospects.

Financial Results

• Atlas, MongoDB’s cloud database service, saw a growth reacceleration to 29%.
• Internal execution was a key driver, with a focus on optimizing go-to-market resources.
• The company is strategically investing gross profit to drive growth rather than cutting costs.

Operational Updates

• MongoDB is shifting its focus upmarket, targeting larger customers for better sales productivity.
• The company is enhancing services for small and medium-sized businesses through a product-led growth motion.
• Strategic workloads are growing faster and for longer, particularly in the U.S. and Europe.

Future Outlook

• MongoDB plans to continue investing in growth while optimizing efficiency and margin expansion.
• The company is well-positioned for AI-enabled applications and aims to leverage AI for database migration.
• Upcoming Investor Day will focus on the durable growth of Atlas and margin-driving strategies.

Q&A Highlights

• MongoDB addressed the popularity of Postgres, noting its limitations in scaling and lack of native JSON support.
• The company emphasized its flexible data model, distributed system design, and unified platform as key advantages.
• Relationships with hyperscalers like Microsoft Azure are strong, with Atlas workloads reflecting market share.

For a more detailed understanding, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference:

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Everybody, Tyler Radke here. I co head the software sector at Citi. Welcome to day one, the Citi Tech Conference. We’re, towards the end of the first day, happy to have MongoDB, to to help close out the the software track. We got CEO, Dave Itacharia and, new CFO, Mike Barry.

Gentlemen, thanks for making the appearance. And and, Dave, I think, the first time you came to the Citi Tech Conference was, maybe back in 2018 in the early days of of MongoDB, kinda in the SaaS mobile era. Can you give investors just a quick overview of of Mongo, how you see the growth opportunity with AI maybe in relation to, you know, what what you saw, years ago.

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: Sure. So MongoDB is a next generation database. We essentially, organize data instead of in rows and columns or in a tablet format. We organize data in a document format, which is we believe is a much more easy way and a more natural way to express data in the modern world. We also support structured, semi structured, and unstructured data, which also more mimics the real world.

And third, we the range of use cases go from what I’d call strongly consistent or transaction intensive use cases where, like, system of record applications to eventually consistent where they’re, things like logging or time series data that you wanna track over time. So the breadth of use cases we support are very wide. I I believe it’s not controversial to say that we are the, you know, most popular, you know, modern database in the world today. We have customers that range from the smallest companies, two people in a garage, to the largest companies in the world. And and, you know, we we’re founded here in New York.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Yeah. Great. And and, Mike, welcome. I know you’ve you’ve been to the Citi conference in in many other roles, but nice nice to have you here. Maybe give us a quick background on yourself and what what led you to to join MongoDB.

Mike Barry, CFO, MongoDB: Sure. So thank you for having us, Tyler. Happy to be here. So I and I know many of you folks already. So I’ve had the privilege of being CFO at several great companies, both public and private, mostly in technology.

And the last one was it’s a great company, NetApp. And after that ended, the whole goal was, hey. We’re gonna go enjoy time with the grandkids, maybe play a little bit of golf, semi retired, and then this opportunity came up. And it was just way too good to pass up. And I saw a company that was in a huge market with a great product, with great growth opportunities, and then I looked and when I looked and it’s a little bit better now.

It’s not great, but it’s a little better. I looked at how many of you folks valued it, and I thought, wow. What a great opportunity. And I still if I felt that way in May, I feel that way even more so in September.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Great. Well, I thought a good place to start would be the the most recent quarter, clearly a a very, strong quarter, you know, across the board, but particularly in Atlas growth, which reaccelerated to 29%. How would you just sort of unpack the the drivers of the quarter? Obviously, there’s a lot of excitement around AI, but there’s also a lot of your own execution improvements you’ve you’ve been driving. And and maybe there’s some broader strength in the in the database category.

Obviously, the Snowflake, Microsoft Azure continue to do well. So help us understand, like, you know, across those dimensions kinda what what drove the strength in the quarter.

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: Yeah. So while we believe that we’re well optimized for those, you know, future world of AI enabled applications, and that was one of your your first question, which I failed to answer. AI actually did not play a huge role in the performance for a quarter. It’s really our core business that we that performed well. I I would really assign most of the the value of how we got our results more to internal execution.

We had made some changes last year where we decided that we wanna move more go to market resources upmarket because that’s where we saw the best returns and the best sales productivity. And then we also right. To do that, we also had to better serve the small and medium sized market through our PLG motion or self serve business. And I think both, let’s call it, engines are working well. The workloads we started acquiring, you know, middle of last year through this year have frankly, you know, done quite well.

While we don’t wanna declare a victory, we think that that a big part of that was that move up market. They seem to be growing faster and for longer than what we had seen previously. And then if you look at our customer acquisition count, then the customer acquisition numbers are growing up very healthily, and that’s a function of us being much more efficient in how we acquire and service the small and medium sized market. While those early customers don’t really make a material impact on revenue, they’re good precursors of future growth. And the fact that many of those companies are AI native companies, was also a signal of future growth.

And, you know, we’ve seen this movie before. In the cloud era, we had a lot of, you know, customers come to us in the self serve channel who end up being very large customers like Coinbase and and a bunch of other accounts that are, you know, large customers of ours today.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Right. Right. And so I’d love to double click on the the workload strength that that you called out because I think for a lot of investors, right, it’s not a KPI that that we can easily see. But maybe just give us some examples of, like, what are the types of workloads that you you have acquired in the last year that are doing so much better than a year ago? Is it just size, or are these maybe more, you know, complex, high growth apps?

Just just give us a sense for that change and how how to kinda think more about those workloads.

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: Yeah. The recent workloads are important is in our business, the unit of unit of competition is the workload, not the customer. And what I mean by that is in in every account that we service and support, we also are competitors on those accounts. So a large enterprise could literally have umpteen competitors, and we’re one of the, you know, vendors that they’re using. And in many of those accounts, though they may be large 7 or 8 figure accounts, we still have small wallet share.

So we have lots of upside growth in those accounts. In terms of the what types of workloads, they’re really range. One of the the strengths of MongoDB is that we support a wide range of use cases. Unlike you know, we’ve we’re I don’t like the term NoSQL because I feel like it kinda confines us to a small bucket small niche bucket. But a lot of the lot of other NoSQL vendors are kinda like a one trick pony.

They’re good at one thing. Where MongoDB is very broad in the kinds of use cases and services, which why it’s so popular because you can use us for a system of record, use case like a trading application, a billing application, some sort of system of record application. You could use us for, say, a gaming application. Obviously, we have lots of gaming companies who built their platforms on MongoDB. And then you can use us for things like, as I said, you know, some other some of these newer use cases, like time series logging, use cases, where people are doing interesting things, trying to understand what’s happening in the trends in their business.

So it really varies depending on who the customer is and what use case it is. So I wouldn’t say there was one thematic use case that we saw. It was more the fact that we were getting more strategic use cases coming to MongoDB with our move up market, which was driving the growth,

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: in the quarter. Got it. And one of the areas you called out in the quarter was strength in large US customers too, which which I think was was notable. Could you elaborate a little bit on that? Was it kind of traditional enterprise customers?

What what were these types of of apps or use cases that you saw?

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: Yeah. So I would say it’s both US and Europe. We saw it was large traditional enterprises. As we moved up market, those customers were were basically the customers where we saw those workloads growing the fastest. And I think it just speaks to the fact, you know, you’re right.

It’s very hard to truly understand the user’s dynamics of a workload when we first acquire them because a lot of it is tied to the underlying fundamentals of the end customer’s business and the use case that they’re they’re using us for. But in general, what we’re seeing is that these more strategic workloads are growing faster. And and it was obviously, when we first acquired them, it’s hard to tell because workloads do grow fast in the first couple quarters, but they’ve continued to grow reasonably fast, you know you know, as they’re entering their kind of one year anniversary. And and that makes us feel good that these are high quality workloads that, and if you can keep repeating that pattern, it also suggests that the workloads we’re acquiring more recently have good potential for growth longer term.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Got it. But but to be clear, you’re not embedding that that strength kinda continues on those large US customers and

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: You know, again, it’s it’s it’s consumption is always hard to forecast. That’s one of the challenges of the consumption business. I would say, you know, workloads at some point do plateau. Mhmm. And so it’s our responsibility to continue to acquire high quality workloads because that’s how we drive the growth.

And on a bigger and bigger base, it requires us to make sure we acquire enough workloads to drive sufficient growth. We think we we have all the mechanisms in place to do that, but it’s it’s definitely a work in progress.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Right. And and I guess if you just back up and you think about the go to market changes over the last few years and, you know, to use a baseball analogy, like, do you think we’re, you know, in the later innings of all those changes, are you satisfied where where it is, or is there still kinda more room to improve, you know, either on the workload, quality acquisition, or or, or other parts?

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: Yeah. What I would say, the word one one employee used with me is vindication. We had made these changes last year. Obviously, the stock had seen some volatility, and we had faith that these changes would work, but it took some time for it to show up in the numbers. And I would say we we feel good about the numbers so far, but we’re constantly examining and fine tuning the model.

You know, I use the term pruning the bush. It’s like you’re growing this bush, but sometimes you have to clean you know you know, cut some dead wood, cut some dead leaves, and make sure the bush continues to grow and flourish. And there’s always some fine tuning involved, but we don’t see any need to make any radical changes.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Okay. Okay. Great. So, hopefully, after this last quarter, you’re you’re getting a lot less questions on on Postgres, your favorite topic. But I did wanna ask about that.

Just, you know, from the context, I think, when, you know, investors and and others look at many of these AI startups, some some of which you have, but many of them are using Postgres, you know, the the Stack Overflow survey, which just came out, showed Postgres kind of continuing to be, you know, one of the the the top databases. So, and and, of course, it’s a big enough market. But why do you think it’s become so popular? Like, how would you attribute what would you attribute that to?

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: Yes. So great question. To answer the last question first, the reason Postgres is becoming really popular is because the relational market is consolidating. People are moving off relational. Means are moving off Oracle, moving off SQL Server, and moving off MySQL and consolidating on Postgres.

Postgres is an open source standard. Actually, I don’t know if people know this, but the name is derived from Post Ingress. It’s actually built on a thirty year tech stack. Obviously, it’s evolved, and there’s lots of contributors to Postgres, but the whole relational market is consolidating on Postgres. So that’s the biggest factor driving its popularity because the relational database has been around for over fifty years.

So that’s point number one. Point number two is that for many people, that’s you know, they learn about relational databases first in school and computer science classes, so that’s the first thing they know. This whole newfangled modern databases and document databases is something that’s, you know, you know, relatively new, so that’s something that they learn later. So, invariably, people start building on relational databases. But there are certain limitations with relational databases.

One, they’re designed to be a tabular system, means that you have to organize data in rows and columns. Think of it as a glorified Excel spreadsheet. But as we know, the modern world has different kinds of data, has structured, semi structured, and unstructured data. And to manage that in a tabular in an, you know, kind of or superimpose that into a tabular format becomes challenging. So Postgres has tried to evolve and basically support something called JSON, which is a new standard.

We are a JSON document database. But the fact that Postgres is supporting JSON, I would argue, is tacit admission that their tabular architecture has limitations, and they need to make modifications to that architecture to support the way modern workloads are trending. The challenge of doing that is, like much like software, the architecture you start with pretty much defines how your product works. And so they have to you know, they’ve kind of add on what I’d call a little bit of a hack to support JSON, and so has limitations in terms of the numb the document size it can handle and the performance it can deliver. So when we talk to startups who start on Postgres, they start running into scaling challenges, especially recent AI native startups that we’ve been talking to in the Valley.

And now they’re talking to us about migrating off Postgres because of some of these challenges. They’re not a native native JSON database. And and Postgres and all relational databases are designed to be single node systems, so they’re not we were designed to be a distributed system from day one, so there’s natural scaling challenges that they have. The third advantage that we have is that our data model is inherently flexible. So as the real world changes and evolves, your data model can reflect that.

In a relational model, the model is quite brittle. So as you add changes or what people call schema changes, they’re quite complex and time consuming, so they tend to not happen that often. So invariably, relational applications tend to incur a lot of technical debt. And so one of the advantages and one of the reasons people choose MongoDB is as the data model requires lots of changes, it’s so much easier to make those changes in our database than, say, a relational database. So for those reasons, people do gravitate to MongoDB.

But, again, I cannot stress enough. Postgres does not have to die for us to win. Mhmm. We have a very small share today of the market. And the blessing and curse of this market is that the you can have small percent share and be a $2,000,000,000 company.

The curse is that it takes time to educate the whole market about your inherent advantages and to keep up with all the things that we have. And the onto that point, what I would say is the analogy of us against Postgres is actually wrong because we also embed a search engine, a vector engine, and an embedding model. So if you wanna really compare MongoDB, you have to compare it to Postgres plus, like, a search engine like Elastic plus a vector database like Pinecone plus, say, embedding models from a third party like Cohere or OpenAI. So that’s so then the value is that you get all that on one platform, one unified, elegant developer experience, all the data is one place. And you can do some interesting things.

Like, for example, you can auto embed data as it’s entered to the MongoDB using the voyage embedding models. So it just really simplifies a developer’s life as to think about building either, you know, regular applications or now these newfangled AI applications.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Yeah. No. Super interesting. And I I guess as you think about that dynamic where some of these startups in the valley maybe startup’s not the right word because in the scale of, their their revenue where they are running into to Postgres scaling issues. Like, how far through that, you know, opportunity are we?

I mean, I know it’s early days in in in AI, but, like, as we think about the new customers you’ve you’ve added, are those, like, Postgres replacements, or is this or is this something that just hasn’t really played out, but you think maybe, you know, in the quarters and and years ahead?

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: So a lot of the new customers we, have added self identify as AI, you know, companies. So that’s a good sign for us because we are adding a lot of those companies who are kind of thinking about using us as their platform, which gives us you know, it feels makes us feel confident about the future. Some of those companies are not really hitting product market fit, so they’re still quite small. Some of those are thin wrappers on top of the LM, so we’ll see how durable their business is. But the point is that we are definitely attracting the next genre of developers to our platform.

So that makes us feel good. We do have some large AI customers. They were not material enough to to be material for our growth, but they’re, you know, important customers and are, you know, are well known customers in the AI community. And we feel like it’s still very early days. I mean, if you think about it, there’s probably sub 20 ISVs who are getting any meaningful a I what I call AI centric or AI native ISVs who are getting any meaningful traction in the marketplace.

It’s not like hundreds of them. Mhmm. And I think you’re gonna start seeing more. And so I think still think we’re in the very early innings of this whole AI journey as and especially in the enterprise. I think the enterprise is still very, very early innings in terms of the AI use cases.

Most of them are focused on end user productivity, whether it’s cogen, business users using kind of tools to extract data, to summarize data, to distill data, to maybe, you know, auto generate, you know, presentations and spreadsheets. But it’s when you when I talk to financial executives, for example, you know, within a 10 mile radius of this hotel and ask them, is AI transforming your business? And the apps say no. We’re still in very, very early days.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Right. Right. And and when you think about your use cases within these these AI customers, are you do, you know, do you sort of envision that your the the growth of the Mongo usage will will scale with with the the revenue of those businesses, or does it kinda depend across AI customers?

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: I mean, it’s hard to give you, like, a standard answer. It really depends on customer. But in general, as their business grows, our business should grow because we see that with almost every customer. Like, our usage is tied to the end customer’s business. The types of usage, like, we can be we sometimes are the memory memory layer or the library for the for the application.

We maintain state. You know, inference is the high ground for AI. And to do inference, you need to have an OLTP platform. You cannot do it on an OLAP platform because you need to leverage the real time data to make a decision on what to do based on what state something’s in and what action you need to take. And so, we are well positioned for as inference workloads get become more and more popular in the enterprise, we feel like we’re well positioned to win win many of those workloads.

Got it. Got it.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Okay. I did wanna touch on, migration the migration opportunity, you know, just given there’s been a lot of product, innovation with the relational migrator tool. And, I know you’ve you’ve kind of been ramping up almost like a forward deployed engineer style model to to help accelerate these these migrations. But just talk to us you you talked about the relational market consolidating. How is that how are you taking advantage of that in in terms of that migration business?

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: Yeah. So when we think about it from a first principles approach, why would customers wanna migrate? Well, if you look at there’s a thousands of relational applications that an average enterprise has, And the challenges are are numerous. One, the tax of running on those legacy platforms is very, very high. There’s a ton of technical debt that those applications occurred because it’s hard to innovate on those platforms.

Third, some of those platforms are end of lifing like Sybase. Fourth, if you’re in a regulated industry like financial services or health care, regulators are saying there’s a systemic risk in your business that you’re running your business on these old platforms. And fifth, if you want to AI enable these applications where not only you just need the data, but you need the metadata, it’s hard to do that on these legacy platforms. You need a more modern platform to do that. And so for a whole host of reasons, kicking the can down the road is no longer an option.

So So we see a lot of pent up demand of customers wanting to migrate off these legacy applications. To migrate, you have to really do three things. You have to move the data. Well, first, you have to remap the schema, then you have to move the data to the new schema. But the third thing you have to do is you have to rewrite the application code.

That has always been historically the most painful and time consuming and costly endeavor. Well, what’s interesting is now with AI, you have all these cogen tools that can automate the code migration or code refactoring process. And so that’s what’s really given us a chance to really go after this opportunity. So we are building an automation tool to do the to do this migration. We’re gonna talk about this in a lot more detail at our investor day, which I know you’re coming to in two weeks.

Literally, it’s here two weeks here in New York, where our CTO and others will go into a lot more detail about what we’re doing there. But it’s basically to to use a product centric approach to automate the migration process of moving off relational to MongoDB in a cost effective and safe and reliable way.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Got it. Okay. Great. Mike, I I did wanna bring bring you into the conversation here. You know, obviously, Dave mentioned the the Investor Day.

But before we get into, you know, what what you have planned for all of us, I’d love for you just to kinda give your perspective on, you know, how you think about efficiency at Mongo. You know, I think you have two quarters under your belt or at least two earnings calls, and you’ve raised margins twice, which which is good. So what were kind of your observations around the efficiency, and what what are sort of your your goals as it relates to that?

Mike Barry, CFO, MongoDB: Yeah. Thanks for the question. So the great part about MongoDB with the efficiency is this is not all about well, there’s small changes we can make, and we did a small restructuring in q two. This is all about how we invest all that great gross profit from the growth of the company. It’s got a wonderful business model.

So this isn’t about going and taking a bunch of costs out. It is how do we make sure that we are we are incrementally investing to drive growth. And that’s the one thing I wanna make sure is, yes, we are very confident we can drive margins up. But folks, we’re not gonna stop investing in growth because that growth then feeds all the profitability. So for us, it’s about making sure we optimize our go to market.

We have the right people in the right spot. We have the right spans and layers. We have the right mix between direct and and partner. In r and d, making sure that, hey, we’re really focused on on leveraging those engineers across all of the code that we do, that we’re using AI to drive efficiencies, and then all also in the back office. So there’s a great opportunity for us to continue to drive margins up.

But again, I will underline, we will continue to invest in growth. And if you look at our guidance for the second half, operating expenses are still growing pretty significantly and there’s still gonna be an investment there. So I don’t want you to think that we’re pulling back on a lot of stuff. We’re just getting gonna get better about making sure that all the incremental spending is gonna drive growth.

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: Yeah. That’s

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: great. And I I’m sure there will be a lot more you’ll you’ll share at the the Investor Day coming up. But, I mean, do you philosophically, do you kinda think about, you know, some balance or rule of 40 in in in the in the growth of Mongo? Just any anything high level without, you know, you committing to specific targets, which I know maybe we’ll get in a couple weeks.

Mike Barry, CFO, MongoDB: Yeah. So can we talk about a couple weeks? And then I’ll hit that. So we have our investor day in two weeks. We’re really excited about it because we want folks to walk out of there as excited about the business as we are and really focused around two key areas.

One is the durable growth of Atlas and why we feel so good about that. And the other one is being able to continue to drive margins. So we’re going to hit that a lot. You’ll hear from Dave that’s gonna talk about the market, the market size, how we go to market, a little bit about the go to market changes, but we won’t focus a ton on that. You’re gonna hear a lot about the product, the power of the platform that we have, as well as all the new products that we’ve rolled out and that we’re looking at doing.

You’re gonna hear from customers and partners as to why they chose MongoDB. And we’re gonna give you a new view, which is, hey, the self serve model is super efficient for us. And and May Petrie, our new CMO is gonna talk to you about the power of our self serve model. And then I will give a much not a business update, but I’m gonna talk much more about the financials. And it it’s possible we might talk about a long term model at that point.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Okay. That’s a that’s a good preview for a couple weeks from now. So so going back to to to AI, Dave, hit on Voyage a little bit, but I thought that was an interesting acquisition earlier this year. Certainly, embedding models, you know, are are increasingly important as it as it relates to, you know, the emerging AI stack. And I think Anthropic actually kind of recommends Voyage as their their default embedding model.

So how do you sort of what what’s the vision around Voyage? And, you know, are there other parts that you kinda expect to fill out around that, you know, kind of the emerging AI stack?

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: Yeah. Sure. So one, it’s important to understand that when you do vector search, you’re doing what’s something what’s called semantic search. You know, you’re doing searches that sound like or look like or or feel like x. Right?

And so to do that, you need to embed your data so that the computers can basically compare a numerical represent representation of data to other data to determine if there’s some similarity match. And so what’s interesting is, obviously, LMs use, you know, vector search engines to basically find the right information. What’s interesting is that people kind of took this embedding thing as kinda, you know, for granted and said, oh, you just embed your data and then you move on. What people are starting to realize, and I think what we were prescient and understanding, was that the quality of your embedding model has a high correlation of the outputs of your LLMs. Right?

Because your embedding model is your bridge between your private data and the LLM. No one is gonna give their private data to OpenAI or to Anthropic or to anyone else. So you have to have a mechanism to be able for the LLMs to reason about your private data. The way to do that is to embed the data using an a high quality embedding model. And then the better the embedding model, better the embeddings, which means the better the LLMs can reason about your data.

So you can ask and get more you know, you know, have a more sophisticated understanding of your private data and, obviously, have more sophisticated sophisticated answers to questions that you may be asking the LLM about. And so because of that, people have started to really value the quality of embeddings. And to your point, people are now recommending Voyage as a as a excellent embedding model. We just came out with model three that has very sophisticated features around understanding very large documents, understanding both the big picture as well as being able to chunk up the document to ask very precise information about particular piece of information. So that so these kinds of sophisticated techniques are not available with standard embedding models.

What it’s done for us is, one, it’s it’s obviously, you know, given us more exposure to the AI community because they value these embedding models. Two, you know, Voyage itself is acquiring customers, so we’re bringing more and more customers into the MongoDB ecosystem. And we do see some future cross sell opportunities. And three, we are still selling the Voyage models and the API access to the voyage models stand alone because we don’t wanna limit people who are using other platforms. And we think that the more people use voyage, the more attractive they will be to MongoDB.

So it’s a it’s a it’s been a great acquisition for us. The team at Voyage is excellent. We’re very thrilled to have them, and we have some big plans with them for the future.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Got it. And and, Dave, just on the I wanted to talk about a little bit about, you know, top of funnel and continuing to attract, you know, the next generation of developers. I think it was probably seven years ago when you you you made the move away from the the the o quote, unquote, open source slicing to to SSPL. Clearly, the the the company has grown by orders of magnitude both in the the customer base and and and revenue since then. But how do you what are some of the the things you track internally to to measure that you still kinda have that, you know, developer, you know, network effects or or or popularity?

And yeah. I mean, what just given the the rise of, you know, other technologies in open source, how do you kinda stay close to that without, you know, obviously, the the risks of giving, you know, your your code base to Amazon or something like that.

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: Yeah. So that I mean, you know, when I joined MongoDB, we only had one business model, which is to sell subscription software. And the fundamental challenge with these the the classic, let’s call it, open source model is that you have to find this happy medium between what do you give away for free and what do you charge for. You give away too much for free, it’s very hard to monetize. And companies like Redis and, you know, struggle with that.

Or if you don’t give away enough, it’s very hard to drive adoption, which then basically makes it harder to monetize because then you don’t have enough people to upsell to. So finding that happy medium becomes quite a challenge, and I frankly didn’t love that model. So to me, open source as a service is the best way to monetize open source because, you know, no matter what you use, you’re paying for a little bit. It could be a little or a lot depending on how much you use you’re using open source. So that’s why we found the Atlas business model really attractive.

And I know there’s a lot of skepticism when we first launched Atlas because I said, wait a minute, you’re gonna partner and compete with the hyperscalers? They’re gonna eat you for lunch. And I think people underestimated how customers would value best of breed technology. One of the key things that we saw with the more traditional open source licenses was that other companies, in particular, some of the cloud companies would take the open source, put it on their platform, monetize the technology, but not have to give anything back to the original contributors of the code. And we had incurred a lot of you know, we raised a lot of capital from investors, and we had you know, we’re hiring very expensive engineers.

We felt like we needed to get a reasonable return on that investment. So we felt it was important to protect our IP. So we came out, we first run AGPL and then we came out and which is a standard open source license. And then we came out with our own version, which is called server side, a license called SSPL. And you know, we tried to work with the OSI, but at that point, they were not, you know, really open to the idea of a new license.

And we felt that there had to be new license in the world of of of cloud. And so we came out with our own license. A lot of people was like, oh my god. You’re gonna have you know, people abandon MongoDB because you’re not on a standard open source license. And I thought about that promise that if you’re a developer sitting in Shanghai or Mumbai or New York or Palo Alto, are you really gonna care about, like, what license you’re using, or are you gonna care about the fact that it’s free to use, free to modify?

You can still do everything you wanna do. The only limitation is that you can’t create a competing MongoDB as a service offering that you have to open source all the extensions you built to MongoDB and the underlying management plane. And so the average developer is not gonna worry about that, and that that paid off. And our business only grew faster after SSPL. There are some people who are quite religious and dogmatic about licensing.

And so some people still don’t view us as a real open source solution. It hasn’t hurt our adoption. We are still the most popular modern database in the world, and we’re continuing to see, you know, millions of downloads, you know, every month of our software. And, you know, our job is to continue to educate the market about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. And our partnerships with the hyperscalers is is very productive.

We partner and compete, and we know how to do that well. And and we have a strong community. We’ll be making some announcements on how we’re continuing to invest in the community product. We’re bringing new capabilities to the community product, which we’ll talk about on investor day and on the keynote before investor day. So there’ll be some interesting announcements showing our commitment to the community, and that I think that will be well received by, you know, all the users who either want to use MongoDB or use MongoDB today.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Sure. Sure. And I guess you you touched on the hyperscalers. You know, last year at your Investor Day, you had a gentleman from Microsoft, obviously, the Azure marketplace business. Microsoft, obviously, has seen their growth accelerate quite a bit since then.

Last quarter, they did call out strength in both Cosmos as well as Postgres database strength across the board. Are you how do you kind of view yourselves within that context? I mean, is there a bit more competition as as opposed to to partnerships, or do you are you kind of benefiting from that?

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: No. The Azure their game. The Azure relationship are I I should just say roughly our share of of the Atlas workloads on the hyperscalers kinda mirrors their share in the marketplace. Just roughly, it should that that’d be a good framework for you to think about. And our Azure business is actually growing quite well.

So we are actually quite pleased with the the growth and the, you know, the quality of the relationship and the partnership we have with Azure. Again, I I cannot stress enough. This is not a zero sum game market. This is not, you know, this is not a social, you know, mark social media market. This is not a search engine market.

This is an enterprise infrastructure market, and there can be multiple winners. And we have a low percentage of share, and we just grow the share points a couple points up into the right, and we’re, you know, we’re gonna be double or triple the size of of the business today.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Yeah. Great. Well, in the last thirty seconds, I just wanted to leave it both back or hand it back over to you if there was anything you wanted to get across to investors, any other previews you wanted to slip in for the Investor Day coming up, but appreciate you making the time here.

Dave Itacharia, CEO, MongoDB: Yeah. Thank you very much for having us. Obviously, we’re proud to be a New York headquartered company. Glad to be here in New York City today. We feel really good about the market.

I just wanna remind people we’re going after a massive market. There can be multiple winners. We have a really durable technical advantage. We think we’re well positioned for the coming AI wave, and we serve some of the most demanding sophisticated customers, which I think serves us well going to this next phase of this technology shift.

Tyler Radke, Co-head of the Software Sector, Citi: Thank you. Great. Thank you. Great.

Mike Barry, CFO, MongoDB: Thank you.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.