Photo Credit: Garrett Heath/Flickr.com

Last year, Billion Dollar Unicorn club member MongoDB (Nasdaq: MDB) went public and became the first non-Hadoop Big Data vendor to do so. Since its listing, the stock has had a roller coaster ride, but despite the misses, has maintained its Unicorn status. Here is a quick look at its financials and performance so far.

MongoDB’s Financials

New York-based MongoDB was founded in 2007 by entrepreneurs Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz. It has developed the NoSQL technology that can naturally scale-out architecture. Its technology allows organizations to string together commodity hardware to handle increased workload and caters to the new, complex, and unstructured data types that are being built and are needed by apps and programming languages. Overall, it is a data model that provides faster, real-time performance for app management while improving customer experience and cost management.

MongoDB operates on a subscription-based business model. It also offers its Community Server as part of a freemium service that helps promote developer usage, familiarity, and adoption of the platform. Overall, MongoDB’s software has been downloaded over 10 million times during 2017 and continues to earn them higher revenues. As of July 2017, MongoDB had more than 4,300 customers across 85 countries. For the fiscal year ended January revenues have grown to $101.4 million in 2017 from $65.3 million in 2016 and from $40.8 million in 2015. For the six months ended July 2017, revenues grew 51% to $68 million. Higher revenues have not translated to profits as the company continues to suffer losses. Net loss for fiscal 2017 came in at $86.7 million, compared with $73.5 million in 2016 and $76.7 million in 2015. For the six months ended July 2017, it reported a net loss of $45.8 million.

It recently announced its third quarter, fiscal 2018 results that beat expectations, but failed to do much for the stock. For the quarter, revenues grew 58% over the year to $41.5 million with subscription revenues growing 59% to $37.9 million and services revenue growing 44% to $3.6 million. Net loss increased to $24.2 million compared with $19.5 million reported a year ago. On an adjusted basis, net loss of $0.44 per share was higher than $0.40 reported a year ago. The market was looking for revenues of $37.2 million and a loss of $0.49 a share.

For the current quarter, MongoDB expects to generate revenues of $42-$42.5 million with a net loss of $0.42-$0.43 per share. The Street had forecast revenues of $41.3 million for the quarter and a net loss of $0.44 per share.

Till late last year, MongoDB was privately held and had raised $311 million from investors including Union Square Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, Red Hat, Intel Capital, In-Q-Tel, New Enterprise Associates, EMC, Salesforce, Fidelity Investments, T. Rowe Price, and Altimeter Capital. Its last round of funding was held in January 2015 when it raised $80 million at an undisclosed valuation.

In October last year, MongoDB went public and raised $256 million by selling shares at $24 each. Its valuation at the time of listing was $1.6 billion, compared with an earlier estimated valuation of $1.8 billion.

MongoDB’s Product Expansion

MongoDB continues to upgrade its offerings to drive market expansion. Its latest upgrade, version 3.6, includes several enhancements such as Change Streams that allow developers to build event-driven, real-time applications; Retryable Writes that ensure a database server goes down for just a millisecond while the database retries the operation in the background; Cross Region Replication for MongoDB Atlas that ensures that an application stays up even if an entire cloud region goes down.

It also expanded its partnerships as part of growing the ecosystem. It tied up with Infosys to launch a new mainframe offloading that will help organizations accelerate their digital transformation and application modernization strategies. It also tied up with Tableau to introduce a MongoDB Connector for BI that will allow users to visually analyze modern data structures accessed from MongoDB Enterprise Advanced.

According to DB-Engine’s latest report, within the Document Stores segment, MongoDB has been ranked a leader in the NoSQL database segment since last year. It is followed by Amazon’s DynamoDB, Couchbase, and CouchDB. The big mover in the market has been Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, which moved from its tenth position to fifth this month.

Market reports suggest that the NoSQL database market will grow 35% annually over the next few years to $4 billion by 2020. An IDC report estimates that the NoSQL databases currently account for a 3% market share of the overall database market, and that share will go up to 5.3% by 2020. Such growth forecasts and leadership positioning spell good times for MongoDB in the coming years. But for now, its stock performance seems rocky.

Its stock is currently trading at $29.61 with a market capitalization of $1.5 billion. It had touched a high $34 soon after listing and had fallen to a low of $24.62 in December last year.