MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria arrives at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 9, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Database software maker MongoDB said on Monday that CEO Dev Ittycheria is stepping down from the top job after an 11-year run.
Chirantan “CJ” Desai, who has spent the past year as president of product and engineering at Cloudflare, is replacing Ittycheria, effective Nov. 10, MongoDB said. Ittycheria will remain on the company’s board.
“Earlier this year, I would say as part of our normal succession planning process, the board asked me about my long-term plans and whether I could commit for another five years as CEO,” Ittycheria told CNBC in an interview. “I thought long and hard about it, and I talked to my family, I talked to the board and ultimately realized I couldn’t make that kind of decision.”
Before joining MongoDB, Ittycheria was president of BMC, which bought his company BladeLogic for $854 million in 2008. As BladeLogic’s co-founder and CEO, Ittycheria took the company public in 2007. He’s also been an investor at venture firms OpenView and Greylock.
Ittycheria led MongoDB’s IPO in 2017, three years after taking the helm. The company won over individual software developers thanks to its database’s architecture that could store a variety of data in documents, challenging market incumbents like Oracle.
Under Ittycheria, the company prioritized cloud subscriptions, landed multi-year deals, partnered with rival cloud providers Amazon and Microsoft and expanded the software’s capabilities into generative artificial intelligence.
MongoDB’s stock closed on Friday at $359.82, representing a fifteenfold gain since the IPO and lifting the company’s market cap to almost $30 billion. MongoDB’s net loss in the July quarter narrowed to $47 million from $54.5 million a year earlier, while revenue rose 24% to $591 million.
Cloudflare said in a filing on Thursday that Desai would step down on Nov. 7, to become CEO “at another notable, publicly-traded company.” Desai previously served as operating chief at ServiceNow. He resigned in July 2024, after the software company found a policy violation with the hiring of the U.S. Army’s chief information officer. Previously Desai held leadership positions at EMC and Symantec.
“We talked to people close to ServiceNow, as well as other people who know CJ really well, and we felt very, very comfortable that CJ is the right person to lead MongoDB in this next era,” Ittycheria said.
Desai, whose first job out of college was at Oracle, said he will split his time between New York and the San Francisco area.
MongoDB also said it expects to exceed the high end of its guidance ranges for revenue and adjusted earnings per share in the fiscal third quarter. The top end of its range was 79 cents per share in earnings, and $592 million in revenue.
Desai said he’s “looking forward to grow MongoDB to $5 billion-plus in a durable, profitable way, in revenues, and most importantly, to be the gold standard for modern database technology, no matter what kind of workloads exist.” He did not offer a timeline for the revenue goal.
Executives will discuss the leadership change on a conference call with analysts at 10 a.m. ET.
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