10gen, a company which offers enterprises a big data database built off of MongoDB, has raised $20 million in financing, led by Sequoia Capital and with participation from 10gen’s other existing investors Flybridge Capital and Union Square Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to over $30 million.
Similar to the way Cloudera commercializes Apache Hadoop, 10gen offers a commercialized version of, and training and support for the open source database hosting NoSQL platform MongoDB. MongoDB is an open source, document-oriented database designed with both scalability and developer agility in mind.
Instead of storing your data in tables and rows as you would with a relational database, in MongoDB you store JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas. The goal of MongoDB is to bridge the gap between key-value stores (which are fast and scalable) and relational databases (which have rich functionality).
10gen allows companies to scale databases that store and process massive amounts of data. As Merriman puts it, 10Gen allows companies to be ‘nimble and get things done quickly.” For background, 10gen was founded by DoubleClick Founder and CTO Dwight Merriman and former DoubleClick engineer and ShopWiki Founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz
As Merriman tells me, many companies that are dealing with large amounts of data use legacy systems like Oracle. But the problem comes when you need to scale, and buying more servers can be expensive and a challenging task.
And as big data and the cloud continue to infiltrate the enterprise, 10gen and MongoDB have experienced major growth. The company now powers major projects more than 400 customers including Disney, Foursquare, Ericsson, Viacom, Telefonica and SAP. In fact, 10gen’s customer base has increased over 150% from the previous year. Developer support for MongoDB continues to grow with more than 100,000 downloads monthly.
The new funding will be used to hiring as well as for international expansion. 10gen is opening new offices in Ireland and the United Kingdom, and expanding its presence, customer service and research and development in Europe and Asia.