Q4 2026 Earnings Call — March 2, 2026
Management: Thank you.
At this time, we'll conduct a question and answer session.
Analyst Raymond Linshaw (Barclays): Hey, thank you. Congrats, great fourth quarter. Two quick questions. One for you, CJ. At your big event in January in San Francisco, what were your impressions about developer buy-in? Part of the reason for doing it is to increase mind-share again. Share a little bit your experiences there. And then one for Mike. On EA, next year had a bigger cohort, and this year, I'm just wondering if the strength in the second half this year, was that earlier renewals for next year, or is the cohort still in place? Thank you.
Executive CJ: Thank you, Remo. Appreciate it. So January 15th event, DOT Local San Francisco, I would consider a great success. And I would put that in two buckets. Number one, we exceeded, even though it was a weekday, many, many founders, builders, who came to the event and there was a long line outside for people to get into the conference. That gave me really, really good feeling that we invested in the right area. Number two, when we looked at the attendees, Remo, I would say compared to other typical DOT local events where people who are already customers or builders of MongoDB. Here, around 70% had not used MongoDB. And that's what gave me a lot of conviction that it was a successful event where we are increasing the mindshare of the builders in the San Francisco Bay Area where a lot of AI-native companies are being built. The last thing that I'll touch on is that because of the success of that event, and continue to make sure that we are on top of mind for all these AI-native companies, whether they are in security, whether they are in fintech, whether they are in domain-specific AI, we are going to repeat .local in San Francisco again in August this year, which we have not done before based on the success.
Executive Mike: Thank you, CJ. Remo, thanks for the question. So on EA, a couple things. So we're super excited about the year we have, fiscal 26th. was a very strong year, and especially Q4, not only in the run rate business, but obviously all the multi-year deals. So, hey, it's a big business, thankfully. There's always some puts and takes in terms of renewals. I would say there's no material change to the cadence of early renewals. And keep in mind that even if there is one, you won't see it in revenue until that deal comes up. So you shouldn't see any major impact in cohorts next year.
Analyst Matt Martino (Goldman Sachs): Yeah, thanks for taking the questions. CJ, maybe to start with you, you noted the transition for Cedric and Paul has been in the works for some time. Given that visibility, can you provide more color on the current status of the CRO search? And specifically, what are the primary attributes you're looking for in a successor that led you to announce Erica's appointment today while the search for a new revenue lead remains ongoing?
Executive CJ: Absolutely. So, Matt, here is how I would describe it. Personally, being here, as you have seen that I've spent a lot of time with not only our customers, but with our go-to-market team. So we are in the final stages, but we want to make sure that we get an excellent candidate for our chief revenue officer. Erica's focus will be as a chief customer officer to ensure that customers who are purchase or decide to use MongoDB platform, they get to value by providing all the post sales support functions, whether it's technical success, technical support, many other things like professional services. So one, Erica is going to focus on customers who have already bought MongoDB or expanding with MongoDB, how do they get to value and how do they get to success. In terms of the CRO search, Paul is staying fully through Q1 and help us transition through Q2.
And from the attributes perspective, I want somebody who is very focused on high end of the enterprise, understands how things work at MongoDB from a mainstream perspective, but also working with the management team as we expand into both the AI natives as well as enterprises who are building more mission-critical workloads on MongoDB, including AI. So that's the mix, I would say, is somebody who is strategic, who understands consumption-based models on how MongoDB really operates, of course, our enterprise advanced business and has relationships into the high end of the market where we are getting significant traction besides the AI-native companies, which is Harley.
Analyst: Okay, very clear. And Mike, maybe for you, just a couple of major EA deals were announced this quarter. CJ talked about the renewed importance of on-prem. I guess under that backdrop, should investors be recalibrating expectations around growth for the EA business as we look out over the next couple of years?
Executive Mike: Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the question, Matt. So as we talked about, so two things I think of importance in the prepared remarks. One was CJ walked through some very large deals. As you look especially at regulated industries, governments, it is a very important product that we have and those are some of the largest customers at MongoDB. In addition, we're starting to see more of the bundle deals. The on-prem piece is a huge part of it. So what I would say is, yes, it will continue to be of importance. We are actually investing in EA to bring it to parity to Atlas. So certainly our expectation and hope is that we continue to grow that and can even accelerate it in the future. Thank you both.
Executive CJ: And Matt, I would say in speaking to customers, because this conviction is over a large set of very important customers, there is definitely the trend that I'm speaking from our customers is number one, that because of variety of issues related to also AI, that for mission-critical application, there is this trend I'm seeing where they do want to keep that critical data estates on-prem. And this is not just only in financial services. We are seeing that in healthcare and other verticals like government. But when I was in Europe and even in Asia, I'm also seeing that that there is a preference for those industries to also use MongoDB potentially with EA and only certain workloads in the cloud. So this will play out, and all we wanted to outline in today's call is to say this is strategically very important, as in the product line for our customers, and we need to invest in it because it is strategically very important.
Analyst Jason Nader (William Blair): Thank you, guys. For CJ, my main question is, how is your product and go-to-market strategy changing, if at all, ahead of the growing reality that agents are going to be the things that are spinning up most databases and not humans in the future?
Executive CJ: I would say, Jason, I have a very simple philosophy here. And the philosophy also was validated by one of the AI-native companies that has completely built on MongoDB. They had many choices in many clouds, and they chose MongoDB. And my initial intuition was the same as you outlined, is that MongoDB's success over the last many years since the company was founded in 2007 was that builders or developers love MongoDB. And if that's the premise, there was a lot of work done in the product to ensure that it's a very natural way, flexible way, while keeping the business agile, as in the database agile, so that it can move with the business. We want to do the exactly same thing for agents, agents also need to love MongoDB. That requires to ensure that we have all the right integration with the right places, whether it's NCP or whether we are looking at making sure that our APIs in how you manage, how we auto-scale, how we auto-perform during the peaks and valleys, all of that truly needs to be autonomous and driven by machines. And that requires absolutely the focus from the engineering team that how would machines look at this if they want to provision an additional node or if they want to manage cluster because of resiliency across multiple clouds. So that will be the North Star for us, that our agents will love MongoDB as much as today human developers love MongoDB.
Analyst: Okay, great. And then just a quick follow-up on that. Is that going to come in a future release of the database, or how should we be thinking about sort of the deliverables on that vision, C.J.?
Executive CJ: Jason, we do have ambitious roadmap, of course. Today, we are already leveraged by some of the AI native companies, and some of them I outlined this time and also last time, and we are learning a lot from them. So we have ambitious roadmap in terms of truly machine-friendly APIs or making sure that our protocol integration across a variety of protocols that machines demand, and how do we auto-scale, auto-shard. All of that will be throughout this coming year. And what we are going to do is at our DOT local conferences throughout this year, we will use that as an opportunity to announce new innovations that will show you that machines should also love MongoDB. So it will be throughout this year.
Analyst Ryan McWilliams (Wells Fargo): Thanks for the question. DJ, great to hear about Anthropic as a customer at the MDB local event. Love to hear how you think about the opportunity for Mongo to grow within large AI natives from here. And there's also mention at the event that agentic workflows require heavier storage and memory requirements. We'd love to hear why you think MDB architecturally is best suited for these growing types of AI use cases. Thanks.
Executive CJ: Absolutely. Ryan, you know, one of the things I would say is Mike and I look at the entire cohort, AI natives, frontier model companies, others, many of them choose MongoDB for performance scale, security, and other things. And I would say that the good news here from my standpoint is that we are not concentrated in any one customer when it comes to AI native cohort. So that's number one. And as they scale, we will scale with them. But we are not concentrated, even when I look at the growth as a percent of total, we were not concentrated. The thing that I'm seeing, Ryan, very specifically is that people are making initially database decisions in these AI-native companies without realizing that they will run into scale issues or potentially there was, you know, one of the choices that people could have gone with as an AI native company's founders had a massive security concern over the weekend where a couple of governments blocked them from being used.
So what I find is that truly enterprise class database that can scale, and when I say scale specifically, As for these AI-native companies, as their weekly active users or monthly active users continue to grow, like the example we had with Emergent or 11 Labs and so on, they find that MongoDB scales better with them, write performance as well as query performance really matters, and us being a native JSON with search, vector search and embeddings in one rather than multiple moving pieces. If I have to just simplify that, that is the strength because it's an integrated platform that scales both for read and writes that as you scale your AI-native company, they can rely that MongoDB will scale with them.
Analyst: Excellent. And then a follow-up for Mike. The Atlas seasonality in the fourth quarter seemed a bit lighter than typical. Were there any holiday impacts to the fourth quarter for Atlas revenue? or any other one-time items in the quarter besides the Atlas and EA bundling? Thanks.
Executive Mike: Yeah, thanks, Ryan. So looking back at Q4, the holiday seasonality played out largely as we expected. There were really no surprises or deviations from the historical trends, so it largely played out as we expected.
Analyst: Great. Thanks, Mike. Appreciate it, guys.
Executive: Yep. Thank you. We'll move on to our next question.
Analyst Carl Kersted (UBS): Oh, thank you, Mike. Let's stick to Atlas in the fourth quarter. A couple of questions. One, was the two-point beat roughly the framework you would advise the street to think about going forward? And then secondly, if you could just perhaps describe the bundling impact that, as you said, nicked a point off of Atlas, just maybe you could explain why that happened and were you anticipating that?
Executive Mike: Sure. So, all right, let's take a step back, Carl, on Atlas. So Q4 played out largely as we expected. As Ryan's question was, there were really no big surprises during the holiday season. We feel good about Q4 with 29% growth again with the bundle thing. I'll talk about that in a second. It would have been a little bit higher. As Atlas has gotten bigger, we are seeing less variability in the business. And in addition, we're getting better every day at forecasting the Atlas business. So from that perspective, the size as well as customer cohorts don't make as much of a difference in variability has helped. So on the bundling thing, so entering Q4, we certainly have our forecast as it relates to how we think Atlas will do. We always do bundle deals in a quarter, absolutely. This was a little unique in that we had one large transaction that once it closed, and thank goodness, again, it's a really good thing that it did, we had to attribute more of that revenue to EA versus Atlas, and that took a little bit off the growth rate. We did not expect that entering the quarter. So we typically won't walk through those kind of details because we always do bundled deals. This was an exceptionally large transaction, Carl, that did move the needle.
Analyst: Okay, that's helpful. And then maybe, Mike, as a quick follow-up, you mentioned you reiterated the medium-term guidance that you gave at the Investor Day. Maybe I missed it. I didn't hear the reiteration of the high teens total revenue growth. Is that still on the table, just to be crystal clear?
Executive Mike: Thank you for asking the question. Yes, we have not backed off on that total revenue growth from September. Sorry we missed it.
Analyst: That's all right. Thanks, Mike.
Executive: Thank you. One moment for our next question.
Analyst: Hey, guys. Michael, I want to follow up on the last questions here, mainly around EA. Clearly, you had a very strong fourth quarter here with two very large deals and also the bundle that you mentioned that weighed a little bit more towards EA rather than Atlas. I guess I'm trying to think about your guidance for fiscal 27. It seems like you have a lot of momentum there. You're closing some feature gaps. I'm kind of wondering why low mid is still the target for 27, why we hold this momentum in the fourth quarter and in the bundling and the feature parity you hope to achieve. That number is not higher.
Executive Mike: So thank you for the question. So we did have a very strong year in EA and Q4 especially. As we look out to the rest of the year, keep in mind that the product enhancements in bringing EA to parity with Atlas will occur throughout fiscal 27. So we are excited about that. And there was an earlier question about the cohorts. Keep in mind, it is a large business. There's lots of moving parts here. The biggest variability to the business is not the cohorts. It's what ends up closing as a multi-year deal versus a one-year deal. That still is difficult to forecast. And as we have said repeatedly, and we'll continue to say it, we will always bake in more upsides and downsides in that number. We sure hope to do better than that, but we don't want a negative surprise because a deal does not close on a multi-year basis, and that has such a big swing factor. So we feel great about the business. We're going to continue, as CJ talked about, a lot of big customers are asking about it. It's a key part of our portfolio, and we certainly hope to do better.
Analyst: Fair enough. And then maybe as a follow-up, just for both of you with the changes in the leadership on the go-to-market side and the CRO and the field, I guess to you, Mike, A, is there any more level of conservatism built in your guide because of this transition? And B, to you, CJ, year-end, any changes to comm structure that you're thinking about also in light of who you're looking for as far as the CRO is concerned?
Executive Mike: Yeah, so I'll answer it first. So when we do guidance, we obviously take into account a lot of things, the economy, all kinds of different things. So we have tried to bake everything in. It certainly, while it adds a level of uncertainty, I want to underline what CJ said in his prepared remarks. We've been working on this for a while. We feel very good about the team that's in place, and we don't expect any material disruptions. But certainly, that is a factor that we took into account when we did guidance.
Executive CJ: Itai, what I would tell you is that personally, after joining MongoDB, I have spent a disproportionate amount of my time with our go-to-market teams to really understand what is working really well and, of course, where we can improve. And I would say that the bench we have, so our leaders for America, our leaders for Europe, Middle East, and Africa, as well as our leader for now, APJ, I have very high confidence in them as we go through this transition. And these are the folks that really, really executed very well in fiscal 26 when you look at the regional performance, and I am really optimistic about their ability to execute as we move forward. In terms of, you know, overall go-to-market, how, you know, sellers are motivated, what we are looking for in the candidate to work on the main street with all these sellers and serve our customers, what I said to Matt is just remains the same, that no changes. We want disruption to be minimum. And with these three theater leads who exceeded even that number in Q4 greatly from a net new business perspective, I have confidence in them.
Analyst Alex Zulkin (Wolf Research): Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. CJ, maybe first for you, given some of the increasing inflection points that we're seeing in kind of the agentic coding space and autonomous coding that's happening, has that in any way changed the dynamic of how fast or how quickly you think that the enterprise modernization could start occurring? And then maybe just a quick follow-up for Mike to the point about the increased, maybe some of the surprising bundling, particularly with a large deal in the quarter. Is there maybe a little bit less visibility on specifically the Atlas Guide for both Q1 and the full year, given that increased potential for variability around bundling?
Executive CJ: Yeah. So, Alex, I'll touch on the first one. What I would like to say, so I was talking to a large financial institution in the UK, and the head of transformation, she told me that, hey, CJ, I have 50% of my real estate that I want to modernize. I know that some of the AI tools can get me to some level, but I really, really need to your help and your team's help to make sure that for this mission-critical applications, we take help from MongoDB to help us land once you prove this out for the first workload, a very critical workload that is moving to MongoDB. The same thing happened, Alex, with a large customer in Spain when I was there a couple of weeks ago. individual said, hey, we are relying on MongoDB as we are modernizing. This is extremely critical workload.
Once you do that, we are going to open up the aperture, and I know that AI will help us modernize, but we still need your help because the destination we want is absolutely MongoDB. So what I'm seeing is the feedback is the modernization and the need for modernization is still very much relevant in the high end of the enterprise, whether it's a healthcare company, financial services, or even government for that matter, or healthcare. Number two, they know that AI tools can help you to some extent, but they definitely want to get there on a modern database to get AI ready where they want help from MongoDB to be on MongoDB. And then the last thing I would say is that even with some of the use cases, they try it and they're like, hey, sometimes this is too hard to assure the reliability, security, and all of those things for the application we built. So I consider this as an opportunity in early stages, and this is definitely a top-down work that we have to do as MongoDB with the CTOs ahead of transformation, but the opportunity still exists and it's massive.
Executive Mike: Hey, Alex, thanks for the question. It's something that we will certainly watch. What I reiterate is, we always do bundle deals. It's part of what we do. Q4 was unique, given the size of that. I'd love to sit here and tell you that there's a whole bunch of those that we'll do every year. I do think right now it's unique. We'll watch it. We get better and better at forecasting the Atlas number every quarter. So at this point, we don't think it adds variability, but it's something we'll watch going forward.
Analyst Tyler Radke: Yeah, thank you for taking the question. Just going back to the EA and Atlas bundling, I guess I'm wondering, were these existing workloads that moved from Atlas to EA, or was it sort of plans for new workloads just a higher bias on EA? And just curious, why do you think that customer in particular chose to do more on EA as opposed to Atlas?
Executive Mike: So it's always going to be customer specific, Tyler. And a lot of these transactions will have renewal as well as upsell also. So it's very specific to the customer. And it really depends on their internal plans as it relates to how they want to use MongoDB going forward. So there's no pattern there. It's very specific.
Executive CJ: Yep. And Tyler, what I would say is that with this specific customer is that they have in the past moved some of their EA workloads to Atlas. Some of their Atlas workloads are growing incredibly well, and they want to continue to do that. and they are currently also getting ready for some of their workloads, AI-ready, where they are using vector search and embeddings in the future. So it is a kind of classic case of truly hybrid infrastructure on how they are dealing with their core product strategy, and some is built on EA and some is on Atlas. And from my standpoint, when we look at the numbers and the transaction, which was meaningful, as Mike said, very meaningful, is that what we also saw was the expansion because this customer, besides making a long-term commitment, continues to grow their data estate with MongoDB.
Analyst Tyler Radke: Great. Thank you. And CJ, a follow-up on the go-to-market changes. Clearly, your background at ServiceNow has one of the more successful partner ecosystems out there. I think on the database side, particularly for Mongo, the partner ecosystem, I think, has been tried, but certainly is not nearly as robust. And given that being more of a focus on some of the new go-to-market leaders bringing in, can you just help us understand maybe some of the challenges with the prior approach that didn't lead out to as robust of a partner ecosystem and what makes you and gives you the confidence that this approach is going to be successful?
Executive CJ: Yes, Tyler, absolutely. And I have been told what you just outlined. So I would put this in three buckets, Tyler. First bucket, which is super important, is our hyperscaler relationship and how we work with them. And as you know that we work with them very closely because when we win, they win, whether we are running on GCP or AWS or Azure or others, okay? So one bucket is just continue to still stay focused on hyperscaler. And in today's world, the multi-cloud resiliency, whether it's on-prem and cloud or between multiple public cloud, which is an advantage we have, it is proving out more and more important between the outages that happened last year with some of the hyperscalers and the geopolitical issues that we are seeing being played out. So that's number one. Number two, system integrators, which is where we scale at my previous company. That is definitely, when you think about the modernization and the real estate on modernization to move to MongoDB, we could definitely benefit by focusing on two or three of them to start with. And that is something that our teams are saying we do need help as we think about this two or three system integrators.
And make no mistake, the third bucket is also equally important is this AI-native ecosystem. There are framework providers, there are other providers like LLM providers, and what can we do with them and truly create partnerships that really matter? Those are the three buckets, and that will allow us to scale for a long time. So hyperscalers, a few system integrators who wants to lean in on the modernization, and the AI ecosystem where we really need to make strong technology friends is how I look about it, and I think it is extremely essential to do that, and this is the inflection point.
Analyst Sanjit Singh (Morgan Stanley): Great. Thank you for squeezing me in before the last question. So, CJ, I wanted to just get your latest thoughts on a couple of topics. Given that, you know, the business has been, you know, accelerating, execution has been improving the past several quarters, as we look forward, do we start to need to see like the kind of AI part of the story start to play a bigger role in terms of the growth equation? You guys have a number of AI customers as sort of we discussed at this call, but in terms of contributing growth, does that become more important as we think about potential upside to this guidance that you laid out? Kind of feel like over the last couple of weeks, we've seen a step up in terms of agentic momentum, not necessarily in the enterprise, still feels kind of consumer personal productivity, but just wanted to gut check your thoughts on the importance of the AI app story coming to fruition maybe a little bit earlier than you maybe anticipate.
Executive CJ: Yeah, I would tell you it's not if, but when, okay? So right now, we do consider, I mean, Sanjit, you know, one of the advantages that I have in speaking to all these customers, I ask them that simple question, where are you on your agentic workloads? And I'm talking about Fortune 500, okay? or big retail companies, healthcare companies, pick one, and ask them, where are you on agentic workloads and are they really scaling? And the answer is still not yet. Yes, they have done a few productivity types of apps internally, but nothing of scale that is customer-facing, even including with a large retailer on agentic commerce and so on. So my first thing is, one day, it is going to hit in a positive way where you will have agents making a meaningful difference to the growth of our customers for either new product lines or existing product lines. We are not seeing that today in the large enterprises across pretty much most of the verticals that we speak to because as you know, MongoDB is across every vertical. So my simple answer is, it will be someday. Not seeing that yet and don't want to predict it because it was supposed to be the 2025 was supposed to be that year. And what we saw in 2025, it was only mainly around coding and some vertical specific AI, but nothing meaningful in the enterprises.
Executive Mike: And just as a follow-up, and maybe, Mike, you can hit on this. It sounds like Atlas consumption more or less came in line with your expectations controlling for this large deal. You mentioned this potentially lower visibility in the second half. And I wanted to assess that comment in context of how the sort of calendar year 25, fiscal year 26 applications and workloads, how are they ramping relative to your expectations? Maybe if we look at the first half of last year and those applications ramping into this year, are you satisfied with the quality of that growth in that cohort of applications?
Executive Mike: Yeah, thanks for the question. So I think a couple questions in there. One is, yes, Q4 largely came in as we expected, except for that small thing that we talked about. There were really no abnormal things in Q4, which is great. On the comment about the second half, that's just more of a general macro comment, Sanjit, in that it is a consumption business. While visibility is always a little bit better earlier, we're also cognizant of, hey, it's harder to forecast the back half of the year. That does not tie directly to any concern around the workloads that we've signed in the last couple years. And, yes, those continue to perform as expected. As we've talked about, the strength that we've seen is really in the larger customers, especially in the U.S. and Europe. So all that is going as expected. That second half was more of a general comment, not specific to any set of workloads that were signed in the past.
Executive: Thank you very much. This concludes the question and answer session. I'll now turn it back to management for closing remarks.
Management: Thank you, Operator. In summary, we delivered an exceptional fourth quarter highlighted by strong Atlas and non-Atlas growth, robust customer additions, and operating margin outperformance. We are issuing strong guidance for Q1.