MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria attends the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, ID on July 9, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
database software manufacturer Mongo DB announced on Monday that CEO Dev Itticheria will step down from the top job after 11 years.
Chirantan “CJ” Desai has served as President of Products and Engineering for the past year. cloudflareAccording to MongoDB, it will be introduced starting November 10th, replacing Ittycheria. Mr. Itticheria will remain on the company’s board of directors.
“Earlier this year, as part of our normal succession planning process, the board asked me about my long-term plans and whether I could commit to five more years as CEO,” Itticheria said in an interview with CNBC. “I thought long and hard about it, talked about it with my family, talked with my board of directors, and ultimately realized I couldn’t make a decision like that.”
Prior to joining MongoDB, Ittycheria was president of BMC, which acquired his company BladeLogic in 2008 for $854 million. Ittycheria is co-founder and CEO of BladeLogic, which he took public in 2007. He is also an investor in venture companies OpenView and Greylock.
Ittycheria led MongoDB’s IPO in 2017, three years after taking the position. The company attracted independent software developers thanks to its database architecture, which allowed documents to store a variety of data, and challenged established markets such as: oracle.
Under Ittycheria, the company prioritized cloud subscriptions, signing multi-year contracts and partnering with rival cloud providers. Amazon and microsoft and extended the software’s capabilities to generative artificial intelligence.
MongoDB stock closed Friday at $359.82, a 15x increase since its IPO, and the company’s market cap rose to nearly $30 billion. MongoDB’s net loss narrowed to $47 million in the July quarter from $54.5 million in the year-ago period, while revenue rose 24% to $591 million.
Cloudflare said in a Thursday filing that Desai will step down on Nov. 7 to become CEO of “another notable public company.” Mr. Desai previously ServiceNow. He resigned in July 2024 after the software company discovered violations of its policies regarding hiring U.S. Army chief information officers. Mr. Desai previously held leadership positions at EMC and Symantec.
“We spoke with people close to ServiceNow and others who knew CJ well, and we felt very comfortable that CJ was the right person to lead this next era of MongoDB,” Ittycheria said.
Desai, whose first job out of college was at Oracle, said he plans to split his time between the New York and San Francisco areas.
MongoDB also said it expects its fiscal third quarter revenue and adjusted earnings per share to be above the high end of its guidance range. The high end of that range was earnings of 79 cents per share and sales of $592 million.
Desai said, “I look forward to sustainably and profitably growing MongoDB to more than $5 billion in revenue and, most importantly, becoming the gold standard for modern database technology, no matter what kind of workload exists.” He declined to provide a timeline for revenue targets.
Executives are scheduled to discuss the leadership change in a conference call with analysts at 10 a.m. ET.
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