Database provider MongoDB has filed to go public, confirming reports from a month previously and potentially becoming the third major cloud IPO of 2017 after Okta and Cloudera.
The SEC filing, available to view here, shows MongoDB made $101.4 million in total revenues in the year ending January 31 2017, up 55% from the previous year’s $65.3m, which was up 37% from 2014-15’s $40.8m. Despite total gross profit of $71.4m, total operating expenses of $157.4m puts an overall net loss at $86.7m.
The company’s level of funding sits at more than $300m over six funding rounds – not including two undisclosed ventures – with its valuation sitting at $1.2 billion in 2013.
Continued losses are of course nothing new in this space, yet citing IDC figures of $61.3bn for the global database market, MongoDB cites a ‘highly differentiated business model that combines the developer mindshare and adoption benefits of open source with the economic benefits of a proprietary software subscription business model’ as a primary reason to take the market.
The company’s freemium product, Community Server, has been downloaded more than 30 million times in eight years with a third of that coming in the past 12 months, while 90% of MongoDB’s total revenue comes through subscriptions.
MongoDB cites legacy relationship database software providers – IBM, Microsoft, Oracle ‘and other similar companies’ are in the document – as competitors, as well as non-relational database providers and cloud providers, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure cited.
No non-relational database providers were named in the SEC; however it appears MongoDB has beaten Couchbase to the punch for going public for now. In March last year, the Mountain View firm secured a $30 million series F funding round, with CEO Bob Wiederhold telling this reporter it would give the company a ‘runway we need to have what we think will be a very successful IPO in the not too distant future.’
Fast forward 15 months, however, and Wiederhold has stepped aside from the CEO chair – although remaining executive chairman – to be replaced by former Veritas president Matt Cain, with no word of a public offering forthcoming.
Okta and Cloudera, who filed within weeks of each other earlier this year, set out solid financial results in their first quarter as public companies. Okta saw total revenues of $61m in the quarter, an increase of 62.9% year on year, while Cloudera hit $89.8m, up 39% from the year before.