Building AI With MongoDB: How DevRev is Redefining CRM for Product-Led Growth

OneCRM from DevRev is purpose-built for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies. It brings together previously separate customer relationship management (CRM) suites for product management, support, and software development. Built on a foundation of customizable large language models (LLMs), data engineering, analytics, and MongoDB Atlas, it connects end users, sellers, support, product owners, and developers. OneCRM converges multiple discrete business apps and teams onto a common platform.

As the company states on its website “Our mission is to connect makers (Dev) to customers (Rev). When every employee adopts a “product-thinking” mindset, customer-centricity transcends from a department to become a culture.”

DevRev was founded in October 2020 and raised over $85 million in seed funding from investors such as Khosla Ventures and Mayfield. At the time, this made it the largest seed in the history of Silicon Valley. The company is led by its co-founder and CEO, Dheeraj Pandey, who was previously the co-founder and CEO of Nutanix, and by Manoj Agarwal, DevRev's co-founder and former SVP of Engineering at Nutanix. DevRev is headquartered in Palo Alto and has offices in seven global locations.

CRM + AI: Digging into the stack

DevRev’s Support and Product CRM serve over 4,500 customers:

• Support CRM brings support staff, product managers, and developers onto an AI-native platform to automate Level 1 (L1), assist L2, and elevate L3 to become true collaborators.

• Product CRM brings product planning, software work management, and product 360 together so product teams can assimilate the voice of the customer in real-time.

AI is central to both the Support and Product CRMs. The company’s engineers build and run their own neural networks, fine-tuned with application data managed by MongoDB Atlas. This data is also encoded by open-source embedding models where it is used alongside OpenAI models for customer support chatbots and question-answering tasks orchestrated by autonomous agents. MongoDB partner LangChain is used to call the models, while also providing a layer of abstraction that frees DevRev engineers to effortlessly switch between different generative AI models as needed.

Data flows across DevRev’s distributed microservices estate and into its AI models are powered by MongoDB change streams. Downstream services are notified in real-time of any data changes using a fully reactive, event-driven architecture.

MongoDB Atlas: AI-powered CRM on an agile and trusted data platform

MongoDB is the primary database backing OneCRM, managing users, customer and product data, tickets, and more. DevRev selected MongoDB Atlas from the very outset of the company. The flexibility of its data model, freedom to run anywhere, reliability and compliance, and operational efficiency of the Atlas managed service all impact how quickly DevRev can build and ship high-quality features to its customers.

The flexibility of the document data model enables DevRev’s engineers to handle the massive variety of data structures their microservices need to work with. Documents are large, and each can have many custom fields. To efficiently store, index, and query this data, developers use MongoDB’s Attribute pattern and have the flexibility to add, modify, and remove fields at any time.

The freedom to run MongoDB anywhere helps the engineering team develop, test, and release faster. Developers can experiment locally, then move to integration testing, and then production — all running in different environments — without changing a single line of code. This is core to DevRev’s velocity in handling over 4,000 pull requests per month:

• Developers can experiment and test with MongoDB on local instances — for example adding indexes or evaluating new query operators, enabling them to catch issues earlier in the development cycle.

• Once unit tests are complete, developers can move to temporary instances in Docker containers for end-to-end integration testing.

• When ready, teams can deploy to production in MongoDB Atlas.

• The multi-cloud architecture of Atlas provides flexibility and choice that proprietary offerings from the hyperscalers can’t match. While DevRev today runs on AWS, in the early days of the company, they evaluated multiple cloud vendors. Knowing that MongoDB Atlas could run anywhere gave them the confidence to make a choice on the platform, knowing they would not be locked into that choice in the future.

The HashiCorp Terraform MongoDB Atlas Provider automates infrastructure deployments by making it easy to provision, manage, and control Atlas configurations as code. “The automation provided by Atlas and Terraform means we’ve avoided having to hire a dedicated infrastructure engineer for our database layer,” says Anshu. “This is a savings we can redirect into adding developers to work on customer-facing features.”

Anshu goes on to say, “We have a microservices architecture where each microservice manages its own database and collections. By using MongoDB Atlas, we have little to no management overhead. We never even look at minor version upgrades, which Atlas does for us in the background with zero downtime. Even the major version upgrades do not require any downtime, which is pretty unique for database systems.”

Discussing scalability, Anshu says, “As the business has grown, we have been able to scale Atlas, again without downtime. We can move between instance and cluster sizes as our workloads expand, and with auto-storage scaling, we don’t need to worry about disks getting full.”

DevRev manages critical customer data, and so relies on MongoDB Atlas’ native encryption and backup for data protection and regulatory compliance. The ability to provide multi-region databases in Atlas means global customers get further control over data residency, latency, and high availability requirements. Anshu goes on to say, “We also have the flexibility to use MongoDB’s native sharding to scale-out the workloads of our largest customers with complete tenant isolation.”

DevRev is redefining the CRM market through AI, with MongoDB Atlas playing a critical role as the company’s data foundation. You can learn more about how innovators across the world are using MongoDB by reviewing our Building AI case studies.