99minutos enabled retail growth and scalability with Atlas

THE CHALLENGE

Scaling database with MongoDB to support growth and meet peak seasonal demand

99minutos is at the forefront of a retail revolution in Latin America: this fast-growing logistics business specializes in last-mile delivery, with a focus on efficient and environmentally friendly services.

Operating in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile, the company’s expanding customer base includes well-known retail and e-commerce businesses. Its core model offers fast deliveries nationwide, including same day deliveries, and its name derives from the business’s original commitment to deliver packages within 99 minutes in select urban areas.

99minutos launched in 2014 and gained early success running PostgreSQL on AWS. However, exponential increases in demand placed its systems under strain. “When I joined in 2021 we were handling 2,000 packages a day,” said Jonathan Andrade, Chief Technology Officer at 99minutos. “Eight months later, that figure was up to 50,000, and a year after that it was 150,000. That’s 7,500% growth in less than 2 years.”

Through a combination of organic growth and savvy acquisitions, the business was also extending its services and geographical reach. 99minutos also provided software to other logistics operators.

“What we really needed was flexibility,” said Andrade. “We needed powerful services that could scale at the rate that we were scaling, as well as building out our customer offering.”

Perhaps more importantly, 99minutos’s demand growth was not linear. The seasonal nature of retail was creating significant surges in demand. “We experience numerous spikes in traffic throughout the year,” said Andrade. “Relational databases are very constrained in the number of concurrent connections they can handle, and you need highly specialized infrastructure to manage that. We also wanted to focus our resources on growing the company rather than managing day-to-day operations. That was why we chose MongoDB Atlas.”

OUR SOLUTION

Supporting 300% demand increases with a simplified infrastructure for 99minutos

99minutos was looking for a microservices architecture that would enable the business to implement application changes quickly, and which would provide the flexibility to unify developments across varied, independently operated regions. The business also needed a platform with over 99.9% uptime to avoid penalties from enterprise clients.

MongoDB approached 99minutos after learning that the company was spending inordinately on a suboptimized cluster. “That established trust at the very beginning. They didn’t just want us to spend money on our database—they cared about us spending wisely, no matter who we gave our money to,” said Andrade, who had used MongoDB in a previous role.

99minutos migrated to MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud in 2021, with Andrade citing its ease of use. The company started with a relatively small but use-intensive service providing a ‘control tower’ tool to monitor key delivery routes.

“Its success convinced us to break down our old monolithic infrastructure into microservices,” said Andrade. “As we started that migration, we immediately realized how powerful MongoDB Atlas is. It was clear that it was the right decision for our main database.”

The migration was aided by MongoDB Professional Services, which gave 99minutos valuable advice on utilization and consumption. “One instance was scaling very quickly, so MongoDB reached out to us to alert us to some potential issues,” said Andrade. “We were then able to optimize some schemas to boost efficiency and consumption.”

99minutos consolidated its legacy databases onto MongoDB Atlas, which unified its operations, providing the company with a holistic operational view and simplified management. “Bringing our services together on Atlas gave us the governance and control we needed,” said Andrade. “As we’ve added more business lines to our offering, we now have 65 separate services on the platform, and our operations are much better organized as a result.”

OUTCOME

Cutting costs by 50% while optimizing service efficiency

Today, 99minutos relies on MongoDB Atlas to optimize routes, manage fleets, operate warehouses and fulfillment operations, and to track deliveries in real time. Its integrated platform provides high levels of transparency and efficiency across the company’s processes.

“Our infrastructure is now completely serverless,” said Andrade. “We no longer have to manage a huge fixed-size database because MongoDB Atlas enables us to manage traffic flows. That’s a significant advantage.”

Now in 2025, the business is easily handling up to 250,000 packages daily—a 12,500% increase over 2021—while continually broadening its offerings and scope. Known for revolutionizing proof-of-delivery technology in Latin America, it uses generative AI to stay ahead of the competition.

“We rely a lot on embeddings to detect when a proof-of-delivery photo is replicated, which helps identify drivers who are misbehaving. We can also analyze those drivers’ behavior on the map to pinpoint others following similar patterns,” said Andrade.

99minutos has cut database-related costs by over 50% while diversifying and optimizing each service. The business continues to achieve growth of up to 40% a year, yet its use of MongoDB Atlas is only rising by 5%.

“MongoDB gives us a very cost-efficient infrastructure,” said Andrade. “For every new project and business vertical, it gives our teams the freedom to build quickly without worrying about the database. MongoDB’s document schema also adds speed and flexibility.”

System uptime is another key advantage. Andrade noted that a recent cluster collapse had only minimal impact on the business, as replica clusters took over. “With a relational database, that would have stopped the shipment cycle for up to five hours. That’s catastrophic and could have lost us business to other carriers,” he said. “With MongoDB, people barely noticed that anything had happened. It averted a huge snowball effect.”

As 99minutos expands geographically, MongoDB Atlas is enabling it to regionalize and scale key databases to offer better response times for business-critical services. It also plans to deploy AI to further improve operations. “It’s very easy for us to keep building things, and we know that the database is going to be there for us,” said Andrade. “MongoDB gives us the ability to become an even better industry player anywhere in the world.”