The database stores JSON documents with dynamic schemas, and is designed to facilitate pushing real-time updates for query results to applications.

Initially seed funded by Y Combinator in June 2009,[2] the company announced in October 2016 that it had been unable to build a sustainable business and its products would be entirely open-sourced without commercial support.

[6] On October 5, 2016, the company announced it was shutting down, transitioning members of its engineering team to Stripe, and would no longer offer production support.

[7][8] On February 6, 2017, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation purchased the rights to the source code and relicensed it under the Apache License 2.0.

There are also unofficial, community-supported drivers for other languages, including C#, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Lua, and PHP.