Personal Finance Startup MX Pulls In $30 Million Series A Funding From USAA and Digital Garage

TECHCRUNCH: MX, the personal finance startup formerly known as Money Desktop, has just inked a $30 million Series A funding deal led by a subsidiary of USAA. Tokyo-based VC firm Digital Garage also participated in the round.

MX previously raised a healthy seed round from various early-stage investors for $20 million late last year. This brings the total amount of funding to $50 million for the startup.

MX founder Ryan Caldwell was hesitant to talk about the valuation, but we’ve heard it’s about triple the previous $100 million valuation. According to Pitchbook*, MX was worth $243 million pre-money and is now worth $273 million.

Much like Mint, Simple and others in the personal finance space, MX aims to make financial management easy for consumers by providing real-time monetary data from various banking institutions and money accounts.

Most of these competitors work by scraping financial data and connecting to APIs to offer a snapshot of where you are financially. MX differs in that it powers a backend money-management solution to the existing infrastructure of these financial institutions. This allows customers of those institutions to see all their financial information in one place within their own banking platform, rather than on a third-party site like Mint.

This latest round was a strategic one that will help MX to rapidly build out this backend with larger financial institutions, according to Caldwell. As an investor, USAA, one of the largest banking institutions in the United States, has incentive to help the startup work with its more than 10 million customers. In return, MX offers USAA a simplified personal finance solution that can “enhance the customer experience,” according to USAA.

The investment from Digital Garage offers another strategic opportunity for MX – helping it go overseas. Digital Garage was instrumental in helping other technology companies like Twitter and Path expand internationally and can offer a possibly lucrative opportunity for MX to get into the Japanese banking market – one of the leading centers for finance and banking in the world.

“We look forward to marshaling the full resources of the Digital Garage Group behind MX to bring industry-leading services to Japanese financial institutions hungry for full-stack solutions,” Digital Garage president Kaoru Hayashi said in a statement about the funding round.

MX is already preparing for what might come next by building out new headquarters in Lehi, Utah, and adding 150 employees to its current 130. Most of those hires will be in engineering in order to work on building a framework to help banks and other financial institutions integrate and automate personal financing into their platforms.

“We’re helping banks be truly cross-platform. Sometimes banks struggle with integrating us into their current offering. We now offer a framework that makes this process much easier. This is part of what we’ve been developing,” Caldwell said.

Caldwell also plans to use some of the funds to hire on the sales and client services side to help guide a fast-growing base of new customers. The current customer growth rate is at 200 to 300 percent, according to Caldwell.