Today at MongoDB.local Bengaluru, MongoDB announced plans to upskill two million Indian builders by 2030 through new local language initiatives and regional partnerships. The expanded MongoDB for Academia program will help equip the next generation of builders with the cloud, data, and AI skills required to scale India’s digital economy.
Since its launch in September 2023, the MongoDB for Academia program in India has trained more than 650,000 students through partnerships with the Ministry of Education’s All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), SmartBridge, ICT Academy, and leading universities.
To continue supporting India’s goal of building an ecosystem that fosters AI innovation, MongoDB is increasing its academia program investment to upskill two million builders by 2030.
The company plans to set up partnerships with more than 1,500 institutions in India and to provide hands-on training and curriculum support to 5,000 educators.
New initiatives include work with HCL GUVI to make the MongoDB curriculum available in Kannada, Hindi, and Tamil languages. The program is also expanding into new regions through an initiative with the ICT Academy of Kerala (ICTAK) to empower more than 100 institutions to deliver training to students across the state.
Through these partnerships, MongoDB for Academia will provide curriculum resources, educator enablement, technology credits, skill badges, and certifications to equip the next generation of builders with practical database and AI skills.
As part of this expansion, MongoDB will also work closely with the premier educational organizations like Birla Institute of Technology & Science, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, KL University Hyderabad, and Ramaiah Institute of Technology, who will integrate modern database concepts and MongoDB expertise directly into their curriculums.
“MongoDB’s founding mission was to make data incredibly easy for builders to work with,” said Raghu Viswanathan, Vice President, Education, Academia and Documentation at MongoDB. “This mission is as important as ever because the hard part about building AI in production isn’t the model. It’s the data layer underneath it.”
“That’s exactly why we’re so committed to expanding modern database skills to be available in more languages and more regions so we can help India’s next generation of great builders thrive in the AI era,” Viswanathan added.
MongoDB will also deepen its collaboration with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to help students keep pace with the rapid evolution of the AI landscape through their joint Virtual Internship Programme.
“In India, we have a massive opportunity with AI to transform our economy and the lives of our citizens. But to take advantage of it, our developers must have the right skills,” said Dr. Buddha Chandrasekhar CEO, Anuvadini AI, Ministry of Education, and Chief Coordinating Officer, AICTE, Ministry of Education, Government of India. “While the technology is changing fast, the importance of strong data skills remains the constant foundation for any builder. We are excited to expand our partnership with MongoDB to ensure every Indian student has access to the tools they need to succeed in the AI era, regardless of what language they speak or where they live.”
MongoDB today also announced new capabilities that address the two reasons enterprise AI projects routinely stall before production: retrieval that isn’t accurate enough to trust and infrastructure that can’t meet compliance requirements. Voyage Context 4, Hybrid Search, and Native Reranking work together to improve retrieval accuracy, with Native Reranking alone improving retrieval quality by up to 30%*. The capabilities are powered by Voyage AI models that outperform Google and Cohere on the public Retrieval Embedding Benchmark leaderboard. Search and Vector Search are now generally available for MongoDB Enterprise Advanced and Community Edition, bringing the same retrieval capabilities Atlas customers rely on to on-premises, private cloud, and local environments where regulated enterprises and startups operate. Together, these capabilities give enterprises and builders a production-ready retrieval stack that is accurate, compliant, and deployable wherever their data lives.
“The biggest barrier to enterprise AI in production and at scale isn’t the LLM. It’s memory, retrieval, accuracy, and compliance. Most enterprises aren’t blocked by ambition. They’re held back by infrastructure that wasn’t designed to provide AI with trusted access to enterprise data. Bolting on more systems to solve those problems only creates more vendors, more latency, and more points of failure,” said Ben Cefalo, Chief Product Officer, Core Products, MongoDB. “Whether you’re running in the cloud, private cloud, or behind a firewall, MongoDB gives you the same production-grade retrieval capabilities wherever your data lives.”
Emergent Labs is an AI-native app development platform and one of the fastest growing startups in the world. The company first tested its platform on PostgreSQL, where agents repeatedly got stuck in schema migration loops every time users refined their ideas. On MongoDB Atlas, agents create and modify data structures freely as applications evolve, and because search and embeddings live in the same database as that constantly changing data, retrieval keeps up with it.
“Our agents write code, modify data structures, and act on what they read back millions of times a day. If retrieval returns something stale or wrong, the agent builds on it, and the error compounds. MongoDB gives us the retrieval accuracy to keep agents working from the current state of the data, and that’s what lets us run two million applications at scale,” said Mukund Jha, CEO of Emergent Labs.
MongoDB in India
MongoDB is a unified AI data platform designed to give organizations and builders what they need to run agents in production—a real-time database, full text and vector search, memory, embeddings, and reranker models—all in one platform.
Currently, MongoDB serves half of the top 100 companies in India (by market capitalization), and more than 50 of the country’s unicorn startups (private companies worth more than a billion dollars) rely on MongoDB’s data platform. Customers include Pine Labs, Tata Digital, Adani Digital, Zomato, Zepto, Observe.AI, and Emergent.
With more than 700 employees in the region and offices in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Gurgaon, MongoDB has been making significant investments in India for more than a decade. Local teams include go-to-market functions, human resources, and finance, as well as important technical roles like consultancy and a dedicated engineering team, which was launched last year. The India engineering team is responsible for building a number of mission-critical pieces of the MongoDB platform, including the management plane for MongoDB Enterprise Advanced, key pieces of MongoDB’s modernization platform, and features that will be launching soon.