Open-source database company MongoDB Inc. is getting ready to launch its initial public offering, almost 10 years after it was founded.

The company, which develops enterprise-grade, open-source software including its namesake MongoDB NoSQL database, submitted an S-1 filing in the last few weeks, TechCrunch reported. The S-1 filing is the first official step companies take in the process of going public. The Wall Street Journal had reported in May that the company had hired Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as underwriters.

MongoDB is extremely well-funded, having notched up no less than nine rounds in the last decade, totaling over $300 million in equity financing. Investors include Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates and Intel Capital. The company’s last round was an undisclosed private funding round led by EquityZen in August 2015, bringing its valuation to around $1.6 billion.

The IPO would provide yet another read on whether companies based on open-source software can thrive. Hortonworks Inc., which went public in December 2014, still isn’t earning a net profit. And Cloudera Inc., which went public in April, saw its shares plunge in June after its first quarter following the IPO. Despite reporting better-than-expected results, Cloudera spooked investors thanks to signs that future growth wouldn’t be as fast as expected.

After rising to become one of the top players in the database market, MongoDB has in recent months began to extend into other parts of the information technology software stack.

Earlier this year the company introduced a new offering targeted at developers called MongoDB Stitch, which aims to ease the task of building application backends using its document store. The new service allows developers to quickly incorporate external components into a project using readymade integrations, thereby allowing them to build their applications much more quickly. Also this year, MongoDB announced it was making a version of its Atlas database-as-a-service to developers free of charge.

Despite the undeniable popularity of its offerings, questions have been raised in the past about MongoDB’s ability to turn a profit. Back in January 2015, Jeff Kelly, an analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, estimated MongoDB’s 2014 revenue at just $46 million, which if true would have meant the company was valued at approximately 35 times lagging 12-month revenue. Kelly added that in his opinion, MongoDB was struggling to arrive at a sustainable business model, and expressed doubts over whether it would ever be able to do so.

It’s unclear whether or not MongoDB’s fortunes have changed during the intervening years, but it’s unlikely the company would push forward with its IPO if there was no viable plan in place.

“This was about to happen sooner or later,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “Next-generation databases have too much momentum to not use the capital markets to finance their growth.”

Still, the challenge as with any new offering is for the company to show consistent growth before and after the IPO, he said. “Databases in general are a great product to achieve this, given the reality that live databases won’t be turned off as fast or migrated off as fast as a consumer app.”

It’ll be interesting to see how MongoDB performs when it hits the stock market. IPOs generally provide a great way for early investors to gain some liquidity, but they don’t always go the way they hope. High-profile IPOs this year has been fairly hit and miss, with companies such as Snap Inc. and Blue Apron struggling while the likes of Cloudera and MuleSoft Inc. have managed to stay above their IPO price.

Already, though, even the filing appears to have provoked optimism by other private open-source companies. “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,” Greg Henry, chief financial officer of MongoDB rival Couchbase Inc., said in an email to SiliconANGLE.

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