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Cloud service marketplace company AppDirect announced that it has raised $140 million in funding led by an investment fund advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management.
“We see cloud solutions as the great leveler to help businesses of all sizes compete. When we started AppDirect, it was in the wake of the Great Recession, and we saw a lot of business on Main Street struggling to survive,” Daniel Saks, co-founder and co-CEO at AppDirect, told eWEEK. “My co-founder Nicolas [Desmarais] and I shared a vision of helping other entrepreneurs succeed by making it easy for them to find, buy and manage the software they need.
“Now, businesses of any size, in any category, can quickly access cloud solutions from Microsoft, Box, Google and more, and our platform will scale with them as they grow,” he said.
Saks said with the new funding, the company is expanding both locally and in San Francisco, where AppDirect is headquartered, and is also going to continue to develop new products off of AppDirect’s core platform.
“With capabilities like catalog management, identity management, subscription billing and data management, we’re working on innovations that will reinvent the way people work,” he explained. “Our end goal is to help every business find, buy and manage the cloud services they need to thrive, and the new funding will help us achieve that.”
The company’s recently announced Monetization Suite extends AppDirect’s capabilities to software vendors and value-added resellers (VARs) with services such as subscription billing, third-party distribution, reseller management and marketplaces, enabling businesses to sell cloud software through all channels.
In addition to bringing new products to market, AppDirect will focus on helping an additional set of customers, including software vendors and developers, monetize their software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
“While AppDirect’s typical customer base has usually been Fortune 500 companies that sell cloud services to business customers, we’re now starting to help developers sell their applications through three main channels—direct distribution and billing on their Websites, third-party marketplaces and reseller networks,” Saks said. “We have an extraordinary opportunity to power the majority of software transactions worldwide, and the new round of funding will help us bring cloud services to every business that needs them.”
All existing institutional investors participated in the new funding round, including Foundry Group, iNovia Capital, Mithril Capital Management, StarVest Partners and Stingray Digital.
AppDirect has more than 1 million paid business subscribers and has raised a total of $245 million since its inception in 2009.
Over the past year, the company has doubled its headcount to more than 350 global team members located in San Francisco; Sydney, Australia; Munich, Germany; Montreal; Ottawa, Ontario; Boulder, Colo.; London; Paris; Stockholm, Sweden; Singapore; and Tokyo.