Emergent Co-Founder Madhav Jha Takes the Stage at MongoDB

Emergent co-founder and CTO Madhav Jha took the stage at MongoDB's Investor Day in New York on September 29, 2026, to explain why Emergent's agents build on MongoDB. A day later, the two companies expanded their partnership.

Emergent Pro and Enterprise customers can now connect their existing MongoDB Atlas organizations to Emergent and run the apps they build on infrastructure they already own and manage. The integration was announced on September 30 at MongoDB.local NYC, as part of a set of new MongoDB partnerships unveiled at the event.

For founders and small business owners, nothing changes. MongoDB Atlas remains the default managed database on Emergent, and it still requires no setup. Teams ready to connect their own organization can follow the Atlas setup walkthrough.

What the MongoDB Atlas integration does

The integration lets teams that already run production workloads on MongoDB Atlas bring Emergent-built apps into that same environment. Customers sign in through MongoDB and grant Emergent access to their Atlas organization, with no API keys to manage.

From there, Emergent's agents handle the database work. They provision and manage the projects and clusters each app needs, inside the organization the customer chose.

Database options on Emergent after the MongoDB Atlas integration, as of September 2026

Why Emergent builds on MongoDB

MongoDB Atlas has been the default database behind every app on Emergent since the platform launched. The reason is how Emergent users build. They describe an app in plain language, Emergent's agents create it, and the requirements often change mid-build. MongoDB's flexible document model lets the agents reshape the data model without the migrations a fixed schema would force.

At Investor Day, Madhav traced that choice back to Emergent's early days. He said the company began as a research lab on a typical Postgres setup, where its agents kept running into database migration problems. "A lot of that headache goes away if you switch to a document-based database," he said.

Madhav tied the decision to the people using the agents. "A programmer might be able to say, 'That migration did not go through, can you roll it back?'" he said. "But a non-programmer will not be able to even articulate these things."

What MongoDB says about the partnership

MongoDB sees Emergent as a leading example of apps that start as a prompt.

A partnership that goes beyond the database

The Atlas integration builds on a wider relationship between the two companies. That relationship spans product development, go-to-market work, and AI-native application development. As Emergent's agents take on more of the software development process, both companies are working to make the underlying infrastructure just as adaptable, secure, and production-ready.

Madhav described the work as two-way at Investor Day. He pointed to joint platform features such as APIs that spin databases up and bring them down, and said each company brings feature requests to the other.

How to get started

The MongoDB Atlas integration is available now to Emergent Pro and Enterprise customers. Teams with an existing Atlas organization can connect it using the setup walkthrough and keep their Emergent apps on the data layer they already run.

Builders without an Atlas account can keep building as before, with MongoDB Atlas provisioned for them by default.

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