MongoDB’s Leadership Shift: Time to Take Profits or Stay the Course?

In late March, we covered scalable database provider MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB) as one of the contenders for a buy-the-dip opportunity. This indeed turned out to be the case, as MDB stock rose from $188.81 to the current price of $358 per share, a rarely seen 90% gain in such a relatively short time span.

After 11 years of running the company, the founding MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria is falling back to board oversight on November 10th, to be replaced by Cloudflare’s product and engineering president Chirantan “CJ” Desai as the new CEO. MongoDB’s leadership transition is planned and orderly, as Ittycheria couldn’t dedicate another 5-year commitment for personal reasons.

Interestingly, Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) has had an even better year-to-date stock performance than MDB, with gains of 122% vs 48% respectively. In this light, should MDB shareholders lock in profits or wait for another dip?

The Center of MongoDB’s Success Story

For developers looking to store and manage their applications’ data, the eponymous MongoDB is a popular and powerful general purpose, document-based NoSQL database. Its code is open-source, freely available under the Server Side Public License (SSPL).

On top of this open core, the company built a commercial layer with MongoDB Atlas, as a fully-managed cloud database service, following a typical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model.

Depending on developers’ needs for patching, storage, backups, security, scaling and other app infrastructure management, they pay-as-you-go, generating subscription-based revenue across multiple tiers.

More importantly, MongoDB, as a company, offers enterprise-grade solutions with on-premise or self-managed commercial packages with annual subscription and commercial license. Avoiding SSPL can help prevent disclosure of proprietary code and mitigate vendor lock-in risk. Lastly, SSPL is viewed as not truly an open source license, as defined by OSI.

With a commercial license, this allows MongoDB to service large corporations in heavily regulated industries that have specific security compliance and data sovereignty requirements. The company facilitates these with advanced Kerberos security features, alongside clients being able to create their own Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for access management.

Overall, the cloud database market where MongoDB operates is one of high growth. According to Coherent Market Insights, the sector has a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.7% from 2025 to 2032, when it is estimated to reach $62.25 billion from this year’s $22.43 billion market size.

This growth may even be conservative, given the rise of AI-powered apps. The company is already positioning to capitalize on AI with its Application Modernization Platform (AMP) to help enterprises upgrade outdated systems that are not suited for modern AI workloads. Case in point, fintech firm Intellect Design picked MongoDB, ending up cutting 85% of onboarding workflow time using AMP.

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Examining MongoDB’s Revenue Stream

In the latest Q2 2026 fiscal earnings delivered in late August ending July 31st, MongoDB generated 24% year-over-year revenue growth to $591.4 million. Of that total revenue, the MongoDB Atlas platform is responsible for 74%, having generated 29% You growth.

While subscription revenue increased by 23% YoY to $572.4 million, services revenue brought in the rest at 33% YoY growth. However, with the exception of Q1 2025, the company is yet to enter a sustained profitability track. This quarter too, MongoDB’s net loss amounted to $47 million, but less than the net loss of $54.5 million in the year-ago quarter.

Yet, the same was true for Palantir. In the same vein of government contracting, MongoDB expects to gain a foothold with FedRAMP High and Department of War Impact Level 5 compliance for its Atlas for Government platform, currently available at FedRAMP Moderate Authorization.

In early September, the company achieved a stepping stone towards the highest level of authorization with its MongoDB Enterprise Advanced for the U.S. intelligence community on the AWS Marketplace.

For FY2026, the company expects to see $2.34-$2.36 billion revenue, up from last year’s $2.01 billion revenue. MongoDB is expected to report Q3 earnings on December 8th, with a consensus earnings per-share (EPS) forecast of negative $0.55 against the year-ago’s EPS of negative $0.39, according to Zacks Investment Research.

MongoDB’s Bottom Line

As the company expands its suite of Voyage AI models and tooling for enterprises to build and fine-tune apps on Atlas, MongoDB is poised to reduce latency and costly data traffic between databases and external AI frameworks. As was the case with the internet itself, businesses are yet to fully adopt this transition, making MongoDB an early mover.

However, the company’s current valuation is more of a profit lock-in opportunity than a buy-the-dip one. This is reflected by Wall Street Journal’s average price target consensus of $359.89, which is in line with the current MDB price of $359.91 per share.

Analysts’ price targets range from $250 on the low end to $430 on the high end. Most analysts are bullish with no “sell” calls. Yet, that doesn’t mean investors shouldn’t take partial profits and wait for a clearer entry point in the next stock market correction.

Disclaimer: The author does not hold or have a position in any securities discussed in the article. All stock prices were quoted at the time of writing.