Take a look at Mendix and you’ll see some oft-buzzed-about themes. It’s a platform-as-a-service company that’s looking to disrupt the existing world of enterprise IT. Its technology is built around the cloud. And it’s located in Boston’s “Innovation District”
Mendix was dreamt up by CEO Derek Roos as a means for employees at big companies to avoid dealing with the red tape in corporate IT departments every time they wanted to get a new piece of software or an update to a system they needed to do their job. Instead, they just ask Mendix to create it for them.
Customers can log onto the Mendix platform from any location and describe what they’re looking their new application to have in terms of function and features. The Mendix technology pops out a demo version of the app within minutes, which customers can review and suggest tweaks and fixes for right away. A final version of the technology is typically ready for their use in days.
“We can sit next to a user, capture these requirements in the app on the spot, and deploy to the cloud,” says Roos. “We push a button, it works. There’s no big contract. The risk of building apps, and also buying apps, has completely changed, because it’s so fast you don’t need to think about it for weeks or months.”
That’s the nuts and bolts of the Mendix technology, but I pulled out some key facts worth noting about the company and how it’s working to stand out among all the others working in the cloud.
—It just moved its headquarters to Boston from the Netherlands
“With the funding and the maturity of the product, we made the decision to step on the gas and move our commercial office here to focus on the U.S market as a primary market,” says Roos. That means Roos, along with Mendix’s vice president of sales and of its VP of marketing moved in January from the Rotterdam headquarters to an office on Congress Street.
Boston and San Francisco were both options for the U.S. headquarters, but Boston’s proximity to Europe, university talent, and Mendix’s financial services clients in Hartford, CT, and New York gave the East Coast city the edge. There are about a dozen employees in the Boston office now, but that number is set to hit 30 by the end of this year, as Mendix is planning to hire staff in customer engagement, marketing, sales, and graphic design.
—Launched in 2006, Mendix didn’t raise a major funding round until last fall
Mendix raised its first ever venture funding in October, with a $13 million Series A financing led by growth equity firm Prime Ventures, with participation by its seed investor HENQ Invest. The company was cash flow positive early on, says Roos, and had grown to 100 employees across four countries (the U.S., the Netherlands, the U.K., and South Africa).
“We came at a point where the product was mature enough to really accelerate in combination with a market that was
