MongoDB to Upskill 2 Mn Builders in India by 2030, Unveils AI Retrieval Tools

MongoDB on June 30 announced that it plans to upskill two million builders in India by 2030 through an expansion of its MongoDB for Academia programme, alongside announcing new AI retrieval capabilities for enterprises at its MongoDB.local Bengaluru event.

The company said it will partner with more than 1,500 educational institutions across India and provide training and curriculum support to 5,000 educators. It will also deepen its collaboration with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) through a joint Virtual Internship Programme to help students build AI and database skills.

Since launching MongoDB for Academia in India in September 2023, the company said it has trained more than 650,000 students through partnerships with AICTE, SmartBridge, ICT Academy, and universities.

As part of the expansion, MongoDB will work with HCL GUVI to make its curriculum available in Kannada, Hindi, and Tamil. It is also partnering with the ICT Academy of Kerala (ICTAK) to bring training programmes to more than 100 institutions across the state.

The company said institutions including BITS, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, KL University Hyderabad, and Ramaiah Institute of Technology will integrate MongoDB and database concepts into their curricula.

“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,” he added.

Dr Buddha Chandrasekhar, CEO of Anuvadini AI, Ministry of Education, and Chief Coordinating Officer at AICTE, said India needs developers with strong data skills to support AI adoption.

“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,” he said.

“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.”

Alongside the education initiative, MongoDB introduced new AI capabilities to improve retrieval accuracy and support enterprise deployments in regulated environments.

The company announced Voyage Context 4, Hybrid Search, and Native Reranking, saying the technologies work together to improve retrieval quality. According to MongoDB, Native Reranking improves retrieval quality by up to 30%, while the underlying Voyage AI models outperform Google and Cohere on the public Retrieval Embedding Benchmark leaderboard.

MongoDB also said Search and Vector Search are now generally available for MongoDB Enterprise Advanced and Community Edition, allowing enterprises to deploy the capabilities in on-premises, private cloud, and local environments.

“The biggest barrier to enterprise AI in production and at scale isn't the LLM. It's memory, retrieval, accuracy, and compliance,” said Ben Cefalo, Chief Product Officer, Core Products at 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.”

The company also shared a customer example from Emergent Labs, an AI application development platform.

“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 said it serves half of India’s top 100 listed companies by market capitalisation and more than 50 unicorn startups. The company has over 700 employees in India across Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Gurgaon, including engineering, consulting, finance, human resources, and go-to-market teams.