MongoDB employees celebrate their initial public offering. (Nasdaq Photo)

Shares of fast-growing cloud database provider MongoDB closed well above the initial asking price of $24, finishing the day at $32.07 after the company successfully raised $192 million in an initial public offering Thursday.

MongoDB built and currently maintains an open-source database that rode the wave of interest in NoSQL databases over the last several years, as companies looking to create and deploy software applications at a faster pace looked for databases that were more flexible than the SQL databases traditionally used in enterprise computing. MongoDB charges money for a supported version of database and has built a few other products for monitoring as well as developer tools.

“MongoDB was born out of our frustration using tabular databases in large, complex production deployments,” wrote Eliot Horowitz, co-founder and chief technology of MongoDB, in a blog post celebrating the IPO. “We set out to build a database that we would want to use, so that whenever developers wanted to build an application, they could focus on the application, not on working around the database.”

The ten-year-old company, based in New York but one of the many out-of-towners with a Seattle office, tripled its revenue from its 2015 fiscal year to 2017 but is losing a fair amount of money. It took in $91.2 million in revenue during its 2017 fiscal year, which ended on January 31st, but lost $86.7 million over that period, a steeper loss than in prior fiscal years.

Still, competition among database providers really ramped up this year, with Microsoft and Google launching new cloud-based databases while Amazon Web Services and Oracle continued to take potshots at each other over database technology. With hybrid cloud deployments emerging as the next phase of cloud computing, distributed databases like MongoDB should continue to see a lot of interest.

“To put this day in perspective, MongoDB is the first database company to IPO in over 20 years,” wrote Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB, in his own post discussing the IPO.

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to GeekWire's free newsletters to catch every headline

Job Listings on GeekWork

Find more jobs on GeekWork. Employers, post a job here.