Mendix raises $25M to make app development faster

Mendix is an aPaaS company that shortens the time it takes to send enterprise apps to market

Mendix, an app platform company that focuses on the enterprise, has announced that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding. Battery Ventures led the round, with participation from existing investor Prime Ventures.

The company previously raised a Series A round of $13 million from Prime Ventures in 2011. This round brings the total funding to $38 million.

The new funding will go towards global expansion, primarily in the company's home markets of the United States and Europe, where it will be opening new offices, Derek Roos, CEO and co-founder of Mendix, told me in an interview. It will also go toward the continued investment the company's products.

"The main thing is that we’ve had a developer ecosystem that has been active and successful. We want to be a market leader, or the market leader, so the emphasis going forward will be on enabling the ecosystem to build apps, and to extend the platform," Roos said.

The company will be focusing on opening it up the platform, and API will be key to that.

The Boston-based Mendrix enables companies to build, integrate and deploy web and mobile applications faster and with better results.  It is an application platform as a service (aPaaS) that  aims to shorten time to market of new enterprise apps, on both mobile and Web.

This, in turn, leads to much greater ROI within days of launch, rather than weeks.

"The company was founded on personal frustration with enterprise app development and delivery," said Roos. "There were long delivery times, huge costs for projects and we said, 'This needs to change.'"

For example, Roos told me that Mendix just finished project with a big financial institution that had already spent $100 million over five years working with an external IT contractor. They were about to pull the plug on the project, when Mendix got involved .The company put five people on it, and it took then just a few weeks to get the first release of the app out.

The way that Mendix makes the app development process faster is by opening it up to a broader audience. With a drag and drop, plug and play, interface, that allows it to go beyond just the developers,

That, combined with the speed, Roos said, is what separates the company from its competition.

"With Microsoft's traditional development, you need to need to be specialist or a professional developer to use it," he said. "Here, we take the extra step and involve other people in the organization in the process."

Roos made sure to note that Mendix is in no way trying to eliminate developers from the equation.

"Quite the contrary, we are looking to target developers as much as non-developers so that can they do what they do best, which is innovate," he said. "We put the means in their hands to be more proactive."

Founded in 2006, Mendix is growing quickly. It just finished 2013 with another triple digit growth for the fourth year in a row, and is looking to "hire aggressively." It has 150 employees right now and is looking to add another 100 people across all regions. 

It is used by hundreds of enterprise clients around the world, including ABN Amro, BAM Infratechniek, Dun & Bradstreet, Genzyme, KPN, Liberty Mutual, LV=, Roche, Sprint and TNT.

Last year, Mendix also opened its new European headquarters in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, along with a new office in the United Kingdom. It also has an office in South Africa.