10gen

History

The company was first established in 2007 as 10gen. Based in New York City, 10gen was founded by former DoubleClick founder and CTO Dwight Merriman and former DoubleClick CEO and Gilt Groupe founder Kevin P. Ryan with former DoubleClick engineer and ShopWiki founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz and received $81 million in venture capital funding from Flybridge Capital Partners, In-Q-Tel, Intel Capital, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Red Hat, Sequoia Capital, and Union Square Ventures. 10gen originally aimed to build a platform as a service architecture based entirely on open source components; however, the company was unable to find an existing database platform that met their principles for a cloud architecture. As a result, the company began to develop a document-oriented database system it called MongoDB. After realizing the potential of the software on its own, 10gen's team decided to scrap its cloud platform and focus on maintaining MongoDB instead. In February 2009, 10gen released MongoDB as an open source project. 10gen opened its first west coast office in August 2010, having offices in Palo Alto, Reston, London, Dublin, Barcelona, and Sydney by 2012.