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MongoDB to raise $192m in IPO at $24 a share

The company is expected to trade on the Nasdaq this week.
Written by Tas Bindi, Contributor

Database company MongoDB announced on Wednesday that it is looking to raise at least $192 million in its initial public offering (IPO).

The New York-based company, which filed to go public on September 21, is selling 8 million Class A shares at a per-share price of $24, above recent estimates of $20 to $22 and $18 to $20.

At $24 a share, the IPO will take MongoDB's valuation to nearly $1.2 billion, based on the 48.9 million shares outstanding.

Underwriters have the option to purchase an additional 1.2 million of Class A shares, which means the company could end up raising as much as $220 million.

The Class A shares sold, however, will come with limited voting rights -- one vote per share -- meaning that shareholders will have limited influence over the direction the company takes in the future, compared to Class B shares, which carry 10 votes per share.

The company has more than 40 million Class B shares outstanding, largely owned by executives and venture capital firms including Flybridge, NEA, and Sequoia.

MongoDB is expected to start trading on Nasdaq this week.

While MongoDB used to be confined to "new applications", it is estimated up to a third of its workloads are getting poached from the Oracles and SQL Servers of the world.

In June, the company announced its next update, MongoDB 3.6, as well as expansion of its Atlas managed cloud services, launched about a year ago on the Amazon cloud and now live on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

MongoDB spoke at the MondoDB World conference in Chicago earlier this year about extending Atlas with the ability to deploy instances across multiple regions and eventually multiple clouds, appealing to organisations seeking to avoid lock-in with a single cloud.

One of new features enables users to visualise data without having to resort to the usual trick of flattening JSON data to make it look relational. The new feature, MongoDB Charts, will let you query individual fields without having to merge them all into a single row, or explode the document and represent nested fields in separate relational tables.

A related array feature allows the user to perform complex queries that would otherwise require multiple aggregation steps, such as find a value, average it, and then compare the averages with other records in the collection. They can also do mass updates of specific line items across multiple documents with a single update query.

Version 3.6 additionally defaults to local host mode, meaning that admins would have to go out of their way to leave cloud-based instances unprotected.

However, the company has faced scrutiny this year when its databases were targeted by hackers. In September, prior to MongoDB filing for IPO, three groups of hackers had wiped around 26,000 MongoDB databases, demanding victims to pay about $650 to have them restored.

The latest wave of MongoDB ransom attacks marks a resurgence of the massive assault on unsecured instances of the open-source NoSQL database earlier this year.

At the time, the company posted an advisory explaining how users should deploy security protections to prevent the attacks, but it appears many users have ignored this information and are paying the consequences.

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