Founded in 2007 by Dwight Merriman, Eliot Horowitz, and Kevin Ryan in New York, MongoDB was created to address the limitations of traditional relational databases for storing the flexible, hierarchical data structures common in modern web applications. The document-oriented model, which stores data as JSON-like documents rather than tables and rows, proved to be a transformative approach that resonated with a generation of developers building web-scale applications. MongoDB went public on NASDAQ in October 2017 and has grown to serve over 46,000 customers in 100+ countries including Adobe, eBay, and Verizon. The company generates over $1.8 billion in annual revenue and has expanded beyond its core database into Atlas, a fully managed cloud database service that now accounts for the majority of its revenue.
Active Founders
Dwight Merriman
Founder / Chairman
Dwight Merriman is the co-founder and Chairman of MongoDB. He previously co-founded DoubleClick, the pioneering digital advertising company acquired by Google for $3.1 billion. At DoubleClick, he experienced firsthand the limitations of relational databases for handling massive amounts of web data at scale, which directly inspired the creation of MongoDB. Dwight is one of the most successful serial entrepreneurs in New York's tech ecosystem.
Eliot Horowitz
Co-Founder / CTO
Eliot Horowitz is the co-founder and former CTO of MongoDB. He designed much of MongoDB's core architecture and query language. A computer science graduate from Brown University, Eliot had previously worked with Dwight at DoubleClick. He stepped down as CTO in 2022 after 15 years building MongoDB's engineering culture and leading the technical evolution of the platform from a startup database to enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure.
MongoDB