10gen, the company behind the increasingly popular NoSQL database MongoDB today announced that it has secured a new $42 million financing round let by New Enterprise Associates. This round also includes participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures. 10gen says that it plans to use the financing to “invest in product development for MongoDB and the MongoDB Monitoring Service and to better support its rapidly growing community and user base worldwide.”
Including this round, 10gen has now raised more than $73 million.
10gen doesn’t discuss its revenues, but according to the company’s own data, its sales increased 50% quarter over quarter for the past five years. The company has also grown its team to 130 employees since early 2011. The company has offices in Palo Alto, New York City, Dublin and London. Among the company’s clients are startups like Foursquare, as well as major players in the telecommunications, financial services and media markets.
It’s hard to get exact statistics for the number of MongoDB deployments, but according to analyst firm RedMonk, MongoDB is leading the pack with regards to companies looking for NoSQL database developers and the demand for MongoDB specialists has exploded over the last year.
Since it was founded by former DoubleClick founder and CTO Dwight Merriman and former DoubleClick engineer and ShopWiki founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz in 2007, the company has been at the forefront of the so-called NoSQL movement. The database itself is available for free as an open source product under the GNU Affero General Public License. Similar to other open source businesses, 10gen focuses on providing its customers support, training and consulting services.
As Sequoia Capital’s Luis Robles told me, his company believes 10gen “is going to be a winner in the noSQL space, and the database market in general because MongoDB is easy to adopt and developers around the world are choosing it more frequently than the alternatives for a variety of ‘big data’ use cases across many verticals (web, enterprise, media, gaming, medical). Millions of downloads and thousands of production deployments are evidence that 10Gen is emerging as a market leader in the big data ecosystem, and we are excited to be their business partners.”
Asked about 10gen’s open-source model, Robles noted that he believes “open source as a development and commercialization model is something that has matured significantly in the last decade, and which we believe will continue to help 10Gen build an ecosystem of partners around MongoDB, and will help the company innovate quickly to address customer requirements and feature requests.”