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Despite handily beating Q4 EPS and revenue estimates, MongoDB (MDB) is crashing to its lowest levels since early 2023. Similar to last quarter, the company saw a greater-than-expected contribution from multiyear non-Atlas deals, driving the upside quarterly results. The issue, though, is that MDB doesn't expect this outperformance to continue, while Atlas growth simultaneously continues to slow.

Making matters worse, MDB commented during the earnings call that it plans to invest aggressively in R&D, as reflected by its $220 mln acquisition of Voyage AI on February 24. Furthermore, the company will step up its marketing investments in order to drive improved awareness of its platform's capabilities. This combination of slowing growth and increased spending flowed through to MDB's disappointing FY26 guidance, which badly missed EPS and revenue expectations.

• The key metric for MDB is Atlas growth since Atlas -- the company's cloud database service that allows users to deploy and manage unstructured databases in the cloud -- is viewed as its primary growth catalyst. The slowdown in growth continued in Q4 with Atlas revenue increasing by 24% compared to 26% in Q3 and 27% in Q2. Unfortunately, MDB expects the deceleration to continue in 1Q26, forecasting Atlas revenue to be flat to slightly up qtr/qtr, equating to yr/yr growth of about 23%.
• Meanwhile, the non-Atlas business, which mainly comprises of the Enterprise Advanced (EA) product, will present a stiff headwind in FY26. More specifically, MDB is anticipating a headwind of approximately $50 mln from multiyear license revenue as the mix of multiyear non-Atlas revenue will not only sink below the levels of the past two years but will also be below historical norms. The reason for this is that MDB will have a more limited number of large non-Atlas accounts that can sign multiyear deals in FY26.
• Although AI may eventually provide MDB with a strong growth catalyst, that's not expected to be the case in FY26. MDB stated that it expects AI benefits to only be "modestly incremental" in FY26 as most of its enterprise customers are still developing in-house skills to leverage AI effectively. Ultimately, though, the company believes that its opportunity tied to the exponentially expanding data that's fueling AI will become substantial.

The main takeaway is that MDB's Q4 earnings report is like a replay of last quarter, but only worse. Atlas revenue growth is slowing and the company's call for "stable Atlas consumption growth" in FY26 is looking underwhelming. Amid this slowing growth phase, MDB also plans to ramp up spending, which is throwing some gasoline on the fire.