Subscription Commerce Co AppDirect Nets $185M For Expansion

Subscription commerce platform AppDirect announced a new funding round of $185 million, which it will use to fund new expansions, hiring and strategic acquisitions, according to a Wednesday (Sept. 16) press release.

The funding came from global institutional investor Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) along with some existing investors.

The total equity for the company is now around $465 million.

AppDirect’s services work to help companies implement subscription services, including easy launching and scaling capabilities. The subscription model is one increasingly favored by B2B operations as they move away from the older one-time models. B2B companies have been looking for ways to implement subscription models for anything that can be monetized based on value instead of ownership, the release says.

“Organizations now need to support full subscription commerce,” the press release notes, as many firms “are running into the limits of their subscription billing tools, making it difficult to bring products to market quickly, creating a disjointed customer experience and management challenges.”

AppDirect President and Co-CEO Daniel Saks said the company is working to help those having trouble transitioning to new digital methods of doing business.

“Today, businesses are facing unprecedented challenges. Many companies transformed to digital selling practically overnight, but they still face immense challenges integrating new technology and processes into their operations and making them work for the long-term,” he said, according to the release. “Our mission at AppDirect has always been to make technology globally accessible, and we are rising to meet that calling at a time when it feels especially urgent.”

Subscriptions have been thriving during the pandemic, Spreedly CEO Justin Benson said in a recent PYMNTS conversation with Karen Webster, as people could easily get many things they needed from them without much effort. Benson said the format was a way to take people who would’ve been making a one-time purchase and get them into recurring models.

He said the challenge for businesses going forward in a post-pandemic environment would be diversification, which will mean utilizing modern technology and offering numerous ways to pay.