The data company MX is set to announce Tuesday an infusion of $100 million from a host of partners, including National Bank of Canada and Washington Federal.
It brings the company's total funding to $175 million, which will be used for additional hiring, software development and new partnerships. MX is also expected to announce the signing of its 2,000th customer, Synovus Financial.
“The funding is really significant for us to expand our partnerships and continue to expand all the different people that we serve,” said Brandon Dewitt, MX's chief technology officer. “There's incredible momentum behind initiatives like open banking and making data actionable. We find ourselves at the very center of that, enhancing and structuring that data so it can be used in a meaningful way.”
MX cleans, categorizes, stores and analyzes data in a way that is meant to help consumers — the company's stated mission is to help banks be advocates for their customers.
“We continue to see a greater and greater avalanche of folks who are catching on to that now that we live in this digitally connected world, and that's where we're going to put a lot of this capital at work,” Dewitt said.
Other firms involved in the latest funding round were: Battery Ventures, H.I.G. Capital, Point72 Ventures, Sorenson Ventures, Pelion Venture Partners, Cross Creek Capital, Industry Ventures, Digital Garage, TTV Capital and Commerce Ventures.
Unique culture
MX’s advocacy message might sound like marketing-speak, but Dewitt has seen the results of it firsthand. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer and given 90 days to live.
When Ryan Caldwell, MX's chief executive, found out, he created a Dropbox folder containing all of Dewitt's health data and charged the company’s developers with finding all the clinical trials and treatments that might be worthwhile. They created spreadsheets and databases and made appointments for Dewitt all over the country, trying out for treatments and trials until he found one that seemed to help. The cancer began to go into remission.
“I'm still here,” DeWitt said.
He’s still on chemo five days a week and there are side effects to being on chemotherapy that long, but he says his colleagues have been supportive.
“Even as we're raising this money and announcing partnerships, I've got tons of folks in the leadership team here at MX supporting me as every two to three weeks I have more tests and I have to go visit another cancer center,” Dewitt said. “I have to visit with additional doctors because right now I'm the fortunate exception to the rule of Stage 4 cancer. They’re supporting me every single step along the way.”
Last July, Caldwell brought his 2-year-old daughter, Chloe, to a hospital emergency room with a stomach flu. Her heart began to race, then stopped. Medical professionals performed 47 minutes of CPR before placing her on life support. She went through several surgeries and had to have an artificial heart implanted for several months.
Again, the developers and engineers at MX set to work researching her case and what could be done about it.
“The MX tribe sought opportunities to get Chloe off of this artificial heart and have her heart start beating again,” Dewitt said. Caldwell and some of the engineers even went to Germany to meet with the inventors of the artificial heart and discuss ways to save Chloe's life.
“I think I can pretty definitively say that we are a different kind of company because we are far more interested in the impact of humanity than we are on all of the accoutrements that people might attribute to the startup world,” Dewitt said. “We are far more interested in doing the right thing and impacting humanity in a significant way, even at potentially the cost of things like margin.”
Today Chloe is doing much better. Her heart has gotten stronger she seems to be on the path to recovery, though she is still partially paralyzed and doesn't have full use of her legs.
“We’re hoping she will keep getting better,” Caldwell said. “When I reflect back on what we've all been through at MX, the fact that we are already on such an important mission has brought together a group of people that tend to be more motivated by mission and people and the results that can be garnished to change outcomes for them. That enables us to be able to rally when something comes up that involves someone's life or a serious medical condition. With Brandon and with Chloe, there already was a group of people brought together who already cared about meaningful impact to people's lives.”
