Digital-native startups are ditching rigid databases for their agentic stacks     

Presented by MongoDB

The gap between what AI models and agents can produce and what legacy infrastructure can reliably support is known as architectural drag, and it is the defining bottleneck of the agentic era. 

The data layer underneath an agentic system must handle variable schemas, vector embeddings, real-time retrieval, and multi-tenant scale, often simultaneously and without human intervention to manage migrations — but traditional relational databases weren't natively designed for document flexibility or AI capabilities. Fixed schemas require manual updates every time an AI agent introduces a new data shape, while separate vector databases add latency and synchronization overhead.

Three digital-native startups — Huntr, Modelence, and Tavily — solved this problem the same way: by building on MongoDB Atlas, a unified database platform with native vector search, hybrid search, and managed autoscaling. Their experiences define what an agent-native data stack looks like in production, and why using Atlas enables developers to easily build complex AI native companies.

Modelence: Building the agent-native cloud

Modelence is an AI app builder with an open-source framework designed specifically for agent-native development, enabling anyone to build and deploy production-ready web applications, including APIs and databases, in minutes. The company recognized early that most backend infrastructure was built for humans, not AI, and that the rigid schema management and complex migrations of traditional systems create operational drag that causes agents to fail when trying to build production-ready apps.

“Choosing MongoDB helped us keep everything in a single place, which is an important property of what we strive to do for our own users," says Aram Shatakhtsyan, co-founder and CEO of Modelence. "Live data streams, vector search, all as part of the main database. For AI agents, it’s especially important to have a single platform where everything can be done, because connecting multiple platforms together makes it more error prone.”

Modelence standardized on MongoDB Atlas because its document model aligns with how AI agents process and generate data, allowing schemas to evolve rapidly without manual migrations. The platform pairs that flexibility with a typed schema layer on top, a deliberate architectural decision. 

“MongoDB’s document model enables us to both keep things simple and at the same time decide how structured we want everything to be," Shatakhtsyan says. We still add a typed schema on top, which tremendously improves the accuracy at which AI can generate fully working, reliable web apps."

The TypeScript integration has been especially consequential, he adds. 

“Because MongoDB types and values can be directly translated to TypeScript, it becomes an extension of the Modelence framework and our App Builder has a single source of truth for both app logic and database,” Shatakhtsyan explains.

The result is a platform that can move from planning to a running live feature in minutes with significantly fewer regressions. That speed and reliability helped Modelence raise $3 million in seed funding and successfully launch an AI-native app builder that handles the entire application lifecycle end-to-end.

Tavily: The web access layer for agents     

Tavily is the search API purpose-built for AI agents, connecting them to real-time, accurate web knowledge and keeping them grounded in what's actually happening, not in static training data. At Tavily's scale, every agent request authenticates, retrieves, and meters without friction. That demanded backend infrastructure built to absorb change without breaking.

“On the user side, every agent request authenticates and meters against it," says Tomer Weiss, Data Team Lead at Tavily. "On the data side, we use it to track the lifecycle of every document we’ve ever touched: when it was fetched, how stale it is, what the freshness signals were and how popular it is. MongoDB’s flexible schema let us keep evolving those records without migrations as new metrics and features came along.”

That living record is what keeps agents grounded in reality. Multi-tenancy at Tavily's scale means managing millions of API keys, distinct usage profiles, plan tiers, and regional residency requirements. They built for that complexity from day one. 

“We separated concerns across clusters early: a user/account cluster optimized for low-latency authentication and usage writes, and a sharded cluster for document state where the scaling axis is URLs, not users," Weiss explains. "That separation has paid off.”

The most critical lesson is about choosing infrastructure that doesn’t punish change, and that flexibility compounds, he says. 

"The AI space moves so fast that change is our norm," he explains.  "For a company serving AI agents, where the workloads themselves keep changing shape, choosing a data platform that doesn’t punish change has turned out to be more valuable than any single feature.”

Huntr: From job tracker to AI career platform

Huntr.co, an AI resume building and tailoring platform, helps more than 500,000 job seekers across 190 countries craft stronger applications and manage their search. For a lean, three-person engineering team, the challenge was finding a data foundation flexible enough to store the full complexity of a person’s career history in a structure that AI could read, reason about, and generate from natively.

“The kinds of career data we are gathering at Huntr naturally aligns with MongoDB’s document model," says Trevor McCann, senior software engineer at Huntr. "The core problem we’re solving with AI job search tools is how to surface the qualities of a candidate that make them unique. We need to be ready to store whatever kinds of data the candidate wants to include in their materials.”

Huntr built its AI Resume Builder on MongoDB Atlas, where the document model mirrors the natural shape of career data: deeply nested, variable across candidates, and constantly evolving as the platform ships new features. MongoDB Search on Atlas handles core search needs while MongoDB Vector Search powers the Job Tailoring feature, which puts a candidate’s stored career profile side by side a specific job description and uses semantic matching to generate a resume optimized for that role.

The integrated capabilities have had a direct impact on how quickly the team can ship, McCann says. 

“MongoDB’s hybrid search allows us to seamlessly query across literal and semantic text matches, a must-have when working with such diverse data,” McCann says. “This is something we could piece together using other solutions but with MongoDB it’s ready to go on top of our existing data layer.” The consolidation of database, search, and vector capabilities into a single platform is what allows the team to punch above its weight. Huntr considers MongoDB the fourth member of its engineering team, McCann adds. 

Looking ahead, the platform is building toward AI that learns from a candidate’s full professional history over time, delivering more personalized guidance with every interaction.

The digital native blueprint

These success stories become a definitive "digital native blueprint" for the agentic era, built on three core pillars. First, by unifying database, search, and vector storage into a single platform, these startups have effectively eliminated the architectural tax of complex data schemas that typically slows down development. This consolidation enables a level of fluidity that is now non-negotiable; AI agents require a modern data platform that can adapt as quickly as a natural language prompt evolves. 

The winners of the AI era will be the ones who build the most performant, durable, and flexible systems to support those models in production. As agentic workflows grow more sophisticated, the data foundation determines how fast a team can ship, how reliably agents can operate, and how quickly the platform can adapt when the landscape shifts again. 

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