MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria has resigned after 11 years at the helm. 

Former ServiceNow COO CJ Desai takes over, effective November 10. 

Ittycheria has led MongoDB since September 2014 – when it was a $35 million revenue flyweight. It’s now a $2.3 billion light-heavyweight.

He took it public in 2017 – when it boasted proudly that it had 4,300 customers. It now has over 59,900 customers. It’s an extraordinary run.

MongoDB’s outgoing CEO has skillfully navigated the challenge of working with hyperscaler “frenemies”, blowback from an open-source software licence change in 2018*, and the transition to a cloud-centric DBaaS; its Atlas managed multicloud service now accounts for over 74% of revenue.

The company is not yet profitable but has been trimming losses, and ended its last quarter with $2.3 billion in cash and cash equivalents. It went public at $24/share and as he retires, trades at $370/share.

(Speaking to The Stack’s founder in 2019, Ittycheria noted that “MongoDB was built by MongoDB. There was no prior art. We didn't open source it for help; we open sourced it as a freemium strategy…" He added at the time: “We don’t think is reasonable is for a cloud vendor to come and take a free version, monetise and not give anything back.”)

“A position of strength”

Ittycheria said today: “This was not an easy decision. Leading MongoDB has been one of the great privileges of my life, but this is the right time for a thoughtful transition. MongoDB is on strong footing, with a clear strategy, an exceptional leadership team, a product platform that is more relevant than ever, and a business that is executing incredibly well. I wanted this change to happen from a position of strength, not necessity.”

He told investors on a briefing call today that CJ Desai “maintains extensive product, engineering and go-to-market strengths.”

Referring to his successor’s time at ServiceNow, he added, “There's not many people in the software industry who have taken a company a little over $1 billion in revenue and turned it into over $10 billion in revenue.”

Desai told analysts on the November 3 call: “Dev and the team nailed the cloud transition really well. Many, many database companies or enterprise software companies were not able to transition to 1) being cloud-agnostic and 2) work in a multicloud environment; with Atlas, almost eight years ago, they nailed that really well… it is our job from an innovation perspective to stay in front of our customers' requirements and lead our way as they transition to AI workloads for years to come.”

Ittycheria’s decision follows a significant ongoing leadership shakeup at MongoDB, which has seen the likes of longstanding CPO Sahir Azam, CFO Michael Gordon, CMO Peder Ulander and others depart this year. 

Azam told The Stack: "Dev built a culture where urgency and accountability weren’t optional — they were the operating system of the business. He believed that great products only reach their full potential when paired equally powerful GTM execution."

As well as new CEO CJ Desai, CIO Deepa Gopinath (June 2025), CMO May Petry (May 2025), CFO Mike Berry (May 2025) are all among this year's new CxO appointments. (The Stack could not immediately identify who replaced CISO Lena Smart, who departed in 2o24; we'll update this when we have a name.)

He departs amid what some analysts hold is growing, if nascent, competition from the open-source Postgres database.

A MongoDB-compatible document database underpinned by PostgreSQL and incubated at Microsoft became a Linux Foundation project in August, and Ittycheria has been pressed increasingly aggressively by analysts on whether he sees Postgres as a threat. (“I know Dev is probably sick of answering questions on that. Hopefully, that's not why he's stepping down” quipped Citi analyst Tyler Radke on the investor call today.) 

See also: Hyperscalers, Linux Foundation back controversial MongoDB+PostgreSQL database, DocumentDB


Company leaders hold that MongoDB, as a pioneer in the document model database space, has built a formidable moat here and a sophisticated platform in Atlas, with low latency, advanced encryption, scale-out, and search capabilities baked in, rather than bolted on. Critics say that CIOs are looking to avoid vendor lock-in and standardise around open-source. The numbers, to date, tell their own story.

Ittycheria said today: “AI is going to be a big tailwind for our business because the more software there is, the more databases you need. And so I think just at a macro level, this is just going to be a big tailwind. 

He added: “Architecturally, we are well positioned for the AI era just by being a native JSON database, LLMs emit and consume JSON, MCP is built on JSON. JSON is well designed to handle the complicated messiness and constantly evolving nature of data in the modern world.”

Ittycheria will support Desai with the transition and remain on the MongoDB board as an advisor and “committed supporter,” he said. 

Prior to joining MongoDB, Ittycheria was co-founder and CEO of BladeLogic. After launching it in 2001, he took it public in 2007, and then sold it to BMC Software in 2008 for approximately $900 million.

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