Peak Performance at Half the Cost

THEIR CHALLENGE

Slow queries and high costs

BID Equity, a private equity firm specializing in B2B software companies, established its position by leveraging a custom-built application to gain insights by scanning and cataloging technology usage across the web. These insights are crucial for internal analysts to make informed investment decisions that are backed by real-time market data. 

As both a computer scientist and an investor, BID Equity Co-Founder Dr. Helge Hofmeister knows how critical an early tech decision is. He chose MongoDB Atlas as a platform that would scale from day one. "If you’re an investor, you worry about everything every day," Hofmeister said. "And you want to start well."

However, the application's design meant that they did encounter challenges with scaling, leading early on to an increase in infrastructure costs and performance issues as data volumes rapidly grew.

“Our inexperience in optimizing meant the system became unstable, requiring manual checks multiple times a day to ensure it was running. We couldn't really do everything that we needed because our setup caused it to be slow,” commented Hofmeister. The turning point came when BID Equity’s MongoDB account team proactively reached out. This customer-centric approach prompted BID Equity to consider a new path forward, seeking to update its data architecture, slash resource consumption, and unlock the true potential of its market intelligence platform.

OUR SOLUTION

Strategic optimization with Professional Services

BID Equity engaged MongoDB Professional Services experts for assistance with an in-depth architectural review. The engagement became a close partnership, with Hofmeister noting how the MongoDB consultant rapidly grasped the business context. “Usually, IT people don't understand what the business side wants,” he explained. “We didn't have that problem here. It was super-efficient. I would not have thought that we could go through this as well as we did.”

Working side-by-side, the team implemented a multi-faceted optimization strategy, prioritizing areas that would yield the greatest impact on performance and cost. This included redesigning the data model to align with access patterns, eliminating bottlenecks.

Another crucial step was the adoption of MongoDB Atlas Search to replace inefficient, regex-based filtering. This unlocked more scalable search capabilities and drastically improved performance. But perhaps the most significant step was the discovery of the main culprit for the high infrastructure costs: an index that had grown to over 1 TB in size. By simplifying query fields and applying indexing best practices, the team quickly reduced it to just 6 GB, a 99% reduction in size. 

As the platform’s performance dramatically improved, the nature of the engagement transformed. “It became quite apparent that MongoDB Atlas gets really performant and I just tried squeezing too much out of it,” Hofmeister said. “By the end, we were developing new features. The consultant even said: ‘Five days ago, you mentioned this one thing, should we look at that as well?’” 

OUTCOME

Gains in speed, cost, and stability

With the implementation of optimization strategies, BID Equity experienced immediate improvements. Search response times improved tenfold from two seconds to just 200 milliseconds, making platform queries feel instantaneous for users. At the same time, optimized indexing and a redesigned schema enabled the rightsizing of the MongoDB Atlas cluster, leading to a 40% to 50% reduction in infrastructure costs. Delighted with this dual success, Hofmeister commented: “I would have taken either the cost reduction or the speed, but I got both.” 

An additional welcome outcome is a far more stable environment. Daily updates and searches are now processed without performance degradation or infrastructure strain, and search accuracy has improved by replacing regex-based matching with the robust full-text search capabilities in Atlas Search.

The performance gain was not just about speed; it was about possibility and innovation. Data that was once locked away in an underperforming system is now fully usable. This new accessibility has fundamentally changed how the team works. “Before, the system was more a background analytics thing and now it is more accessible to our analysts,” explained Hofmeister. “It used to run for a month and then just spit out stuff, but now people can engage with it and that engagement allows for training. And it even makes some machine learning possible, which we couldn’t have done before.”

This newfound capability provides a significant competitive advantage. With instant, data-backed market knowledge, the team can impress potential investors from the very first meeting. What’s more, the transformation—from battling technical debt to enabling strategic advantage—is why Hofmeister lauded the engagement as a true “game changer.”

But the story doesn’t end there. Beyond all these improvements, the engagement has also impacted BID Equity’s core investment strategy. Previously, the “buy and build” approach required external consultants to screen a potential market. This process took months and incurred significant costs. Today, that entire analysis is available instantaneously through the company application. “We can easily say that we save €200K yearly on consultants because of this,” confirmed Hofmeister. In essence, the transformation that the MongoDB engagement enabled has empowered BID Equity with a platform that is not only faster and leaner but also robust and ready to grow with the business.