NoSQL business MongoDB has filed confidentially for IPO, according to reports.

The document database company started life as 10gen in 2007 and has secured a total of $303.4m in equity funding to date.

According to Crunchbase, its last round, for an undisclosed amount, was in August 2015, having gained $80m in the January of that year.

MongoDB was last valued at $1.2bn in October 2016, when it pulled in $150m from investors that included Red Hat, Salesforce Ventures, EMC, Intel Capital and Sequoia Capital.

There have been rumours of a potential IPO from MongoDB, which has previously stated its aim to take on Oracle, for some time.

During an interview with The Reg last year, CEO Dev Ittycheria indicated the company was at a scale where the option could be acted upon quickly.

Ittycheria told The Reg that, with revenues between $100m and $200m annually, "there's companies who've gone public who are smaller and going slower than us."

The firm is now thought to have moved one step closer, with TechCrunch reporting that it has submitted an S-1 filing in recent weeks and plans to go public before the end of the year.

Under the US JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act, introduced in 2012, companies are now allowed to confidentially submit initial statements like this, which them weigh interest from investors before alerting the public to the filing. The idea is to encourage more companies to IPO.

The companies must reveal their financials at least 15 days before they embark on their investor roadshow.

TechCrunch reports that a number of companies that have filed confidentially for IPO will go public between September and the end of November.

Commenting on the reports, Greg Henry, CFO of Couchbase (a competitor of MongoDB's in the NoSQL space), said: "In confidentially filing its S-1, MongoDB is on track to become the first IPO in the non-Hadoop big data space, which stands as a pivotal milestone for the industry and provides more validation that there is life beyond analytical and relational databases."

MongoDB has gained some positive publicity last week, when CTO Eliot Horowitz emailed staff condemning the now infamous "Google memo".

"This manifesto, however, is not part of a healthy dialogue at all," Horowitz wrote.

"It advances a false equivalence between diversity efforts and discrimination built on a substrate of reasonable statements and context-free references to research. It is just another attempt to disguise prejudice in the clothing of rationalism."

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Pssst, wanna know a secret? MongoDB has confidentially filed for IPO, reports suggest - The Register