Today, I’m pleased to announce the expansion of MongoDB for Startups. With MongoDB for Startups, we offer founders the critical technical and professional support they need to get up and running quickly with a future-proofed architecture that’s designed to scale as they grow.
Building on the success of the program to date, the revamped MongoDB for Startups program provides companies with graduated benefits across multiple tiers, and is designed to support startups at every stage—from bootstrapped founders or those in early funding stages, to VC-backed and rapidly scaling companies. Through MongoDB for Startups, founders now have access to 50% more MongoDB Atlas credits, tokens from leading embedding and reranking model provider Voyage AI by MongoDB, and additional marketing and professional services resources. With the addition of Voyage AI to the program, MongoDB for Startups enables participants to build trustworthy, reliable AI applications with state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency.
Beyond the expansion of MongoDB for Startups, we’re deepening our commitment to the global startup community, investing more in the resources, partnerships, and programs that will support the next generation of founders. We’re also doubling down on where the future of AI is being built. So we’re increasing the program’s focus on the vibrant San Francisco Bay Area developer community, home to many of the world’s most promising young companies.
Over the next few months, we will be hosting and participating in a variety of events across the Bay Area, from hackathons, to founder demo nights, to engineering leadership dinners. In addition, MongoDB will be launching a residency program in partnership with Bay Area hacker houses, featuring our flagship partner—AGI House (also a MongoDB for Startups member!). Stay tuned for more details in the coming days and weeks.
The startup engine: Driving innovation and economic impact
We're deepening our investment in the startup ecosystem—through MongoDB for Startups and our growing presence in and around San Francisco—because many of the applications we rely on every day, from groundbreaking AI tools to inventive tech infrastructure, began at startups. We believe in their promise.
For example, Vanta—which helps companies automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI—is a successful graduate of MongoDB for Startups. The company has said its decision to use MongoDB from the start was critical to its success. Indeed, over the summer Vanta (who might have the best ad game in the Bay) announced its Series D, and the company is now valued at $4.15 billion.
"We originally chose MongoDB because it was a perfect tool with which we could prototype,'' said Vanta Founding Engineer Robbie Ostrow, who is now at OpenAI. "But we also found that it's a great tool for production systems.” MongoDB, he added, “helped us prototype really quickly because we didn't have to build tooling and migrate it to another system. And then it ended up being a tool that was able to scale with us."
Successful startups are increasingly being built in partnership with MongoDB. Over the last few years, MongoDB Ventures has invested in companies that provide critical pieces of the AI agent stack like Temporal, an open source durable execution platform. We’ve also supported Fireworks AI, which offers a gen AI platform for running open source AI models, and is trusted by leading tech companies and global enterprises.
We expect to see countless more startups and founders making this level of impact. After all, startups play a vital role in the wider economy: startups and small businesses as a group account for over 40% of US GDP, and US startup revenue has been estimated at more than $1 trillion. According to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, “young companies”—including startups—drive “economic dynamism” and are “the primary source of job creation in the American economy.”(1)
Next Steps
To learn more about MongoDB for Startups—and to apply!—check out the MongoDB site.