MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria on Q3 results, customer demand and M&A opportunities

MongoDB's CEO reports 30% revenue growth and 36% cloud growth in Q3, with customers like Goldman Sachs and Ford using the platform for trading, e-commerce, and billing. He sees AI as a growth driver but focuses on customer acquisition and profitability, while addressing speculation about potential acquisitions.
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MongoDB beating on the top and bottom lines this quarter, but the stock taking a hit this week. We're going to talk about it. Joining us right now is MongoDB President and CEO David Acharya. Dave, good morning to you. It was actually a remarkable quarter in so many ways, and yet the markets decided to punish you for it. Let's talk about the quarter, and I'm so curious what you think of the reaction to it.
Andrew, first of all, thank you for having me. Revenue growth was 30%. Our cloud business grew 36% year over year. We delivered 18% non-GAAP operating margins. We raised guidance. And the feedback from the analysts was that the revenue strength and consistent performance and profitability really looked good. I think what we're seeing is a little bit of the fact that— and this feedback we heard is that there's some short-term money that was betting on even a bigger beat, and those investors are unwinding some of their positions.
Well, that— I mean, look, you have had— there's a high bar to clear at this point because the expectations are so high. In terms of how we— how do you think about the valuation of the company and what you even try to comp, if you will, against others?
Well, our stock, if you tracked our stock, has been quite volatile. And just to put things in perspective, our stock has grown 100% year over year. So we, we still feel pretty good about how investors think about the business. And they view us as one of the beneficiaries of this big new computing paradigm called AI. It's hard for me to give you an opinion on valuation. Obviously, there's lots of factors that you— all of you know far better than me in terms of interest rates and what people think about where the economy is going. All we focus on is being able to acquire lots of customers, drive revenue growth, and show increasing profitability.
So let's talk about that piece of it. As you look out over the next 12 months and you look at your customer base, what are you seeing in terms of underlying strength? Or weakness, frankly?
So we're adding lots of new customers. We have 46,000 customers today who use us for almost every use case across nearly every industry and geography. So customers like Goldman and Telefonica and Vodafone and Ford, and they're using us to power trading platforms on Wall Street, e-commerce platforms, travel sites, billing, cryptocurrency. And so, so people are really focused on innovation. It's clear that there's, there's kind competing tensions. One, people do recognize that they have to make, you know, focus on cost management and be very efficient in driving their business. But they're also seeing this new computing paradigm that's bigger than anything potentially that we have all seen. And they want to make sure they're well positioned for it and they want to make sure that they can use this technology for competitive advantage. So we feel like we're in a good position to help customers do that.
You know, I remember for years— I don't know, I'm sure you know this— there was always speculation about whether you would get taken over and whether you'd sell the company. How do you think about M&A at this point and where you sort of lie in the stack given all the big players? Maybe even, by the way, it could be you're so big now and given the other even bigger players that regulate from a regulatory perspective, nothing could happen.
Yeah, I mean, we— again, my whole philosophy on M&A is, you know, just focus on growing our business. And if someone wants to make an offer that we can't refuse. We'll listen to them. Frankly, we're looking at M&A more for us to acquire interesting companies. We have a very ambitious product roadmap and there's some areas that we just can't get to fast enough. As you very well know, the venture capital market has, has contracted a bit. Startups are having trouble raising money and a lot of them are sitting on very high valuations. So their employees are really working for free because the common stock is not worth a lot. So given that, we're starting to see a lot more startups be open to potentially being acquired by companies like MongoDB. I'm not signaling anything, but that's definitely something that we're putting a lot more focus on.
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