MongoDB Raises $150M For NoSQL Database Technology With Salesforce Joining As Investor

MongoDB has raised $150 million from T. Rowe Price Associates with new investors Altimeter Capital and Salesforce.com. Existing investors Intel Capital, NEA, Red Hat and Sequoia Capital also participated in the round. MongoDB has raised $231 million since the founders started the company in 2007.

The company’s database technology is the most well-known in a field of increasing competition from other NoSQL vendors, SQL powerhouses, in-memory database providers and a new breed of companies offering a new form of database-as-a-service. MongoDB and other NoSQL databases use distributed infrastructures on commodity servers and are popular with developers for building mobile and web apps. MongoDB is a document-based database. Data is defined in data structures, which is essentially encoded to be compatible with different formats such as XML and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). Most popular, by far, is JSON, which is popular with legions of developers who are leveraging those skills to use MongoDB to develop their own apps and services.

The popularity of MongoDB is evident in its global community, where it has had more than 5 million downloads. Demand is reflected on job site Indeed, which lists it as the second most popular search term. It ranks considerably higher, compared to Cassandra, Redis and CoucDB, than all competing technologies.

The new funding will be used to further support the core MongoDB project and to fund its new managed services offering, which includes a suite of tools and services to operate the database at scale. One of MongoDB’s criticisms surround its scaling issues. Orchestration tools have been cited as a gap in the MongoDB service.

The focus on management services also reflects the partnership that MongoDB has forged with IBM. Earlier this month, the technology giant made MongoDB its NoSQL database of choice.

MongoDB customers include Craigslist, MetLife and Salesforce. It is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., and New York with regional headquarters in Dublin and Singapore. The company also has five additional offices in Atlanta, Barcelona, London, Sydney and Washington D.C.

The addition of Salesforce as an additional investor is worth noting. Salesforce has put deep emphasis on developing its marketing cloud and is expected to make a full push into the mobile app space. An investment in MongoDB shows that Salesforce is making a bet that NoSQL technology is worth standing behind in the post-PC mobile world that is now dominating the way we work and live.

The company currently has more than 320 employees worldwide.

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