Eliot Horowitz is a founder and the former chief technology officer of

MongoDB Inc. MongoDB, Inc. is an American software company that develops and provides commercial support for the source-available database engine MongoDB, a database for unstructured data. Over the years, the company has expanded the product from its NoSQL ro ...

, a software company that develops and provides commercial support for the open source

NoSQL NoSQL (originally meaning "Not only SQL" or "non-relational") refers to a type of database design that stores and retrieves data differently from the traditional table-based structure of relational databases. Unlike relational databases, which ...

database

MongoDB MongoDB is a source-available, cross-platform, document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database product, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional database schema, schemas. Released in February 2009 by 10gen (now MongoDB ...

. Horowitz is the founder and current CEO of Viam, a robotics software

startup A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to ...

Career

Horowitz attended

Brown University Brown University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the List of colonial colleges, seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the ' ...

where he received a B.S. in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

. After college, he joined

DoubleClick DoubleClick Inc. was an American advertisement company that developed and provided Internet ad serving services from 1995 until its acquisition by Google in March 2008. DoubleClick offered technology products and services that were sold primaril ...

as a software developer in its R&D group. He then left to start up ShopWiki, a search engine for e-commerce, with the CTO of DoubleClick,

Dwight Merriman Dwight Merriman (born August 5, 1968) is an American Internet executive, racing driver, and entrepreneur in New York City's Silicon Alley. Best known for co-founding DoubleClick with Kevin O'Connor and serving as its CTO for 10 years, Merrima ...

. He developed the crawling and data extraction algorithm for ShopWiki. In 2006,

BusinessWeek ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'' (and before that ''Business Week'' and ''The Business Week''), is an American monthly business magazine published 12 times a year. The magazine debuted in New York City in Septembe ...

selected Eliot as one of its Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under Age 25. In 2007, Horowitz formed 10gen with Kevin P. Ryan and Merriman, and started writing the core code base for

, an open source database. Its first public release came two years later in 2009. MongoDB has become widely used to build high-performance systems by companies. 10gen was later renamed MongoDB Inc. in 2013, and it was listed on

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market (; National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the U.S. by volume, and ranked second on the list ...

in 2017. It has a

market capitalization Market capitalization, sometimes referred to as market cap, is the total value of a publicly traded company's outstanding common shares owned by stockholders. Market capitalization is equal to the market price per common share multiplied by ...

of $27.5 billion as of 2023. In March 2020, after nearly 13 years with the company, Horowitz announced he would step down as chief technology officer, as well as from MongoDB's board of directors, effective July 10, 2020. He continues to serve as technical advisor to MongoDB. In 2020, Horowitz founde
Viam Robotics
to create a general-purpose development platform for robotics and enable robotics businesses to get to market faster while taking advantage of cloud services like AI, machine learning and advanced analytics.

References

Living people Brown University alumni American computer businesspeople American corporate directors American technology chief executives American technology company founders 1981 births {{US-business-bio-1980s-stub