San Francisco and Montreal-based AppDirect is raising another $243 million ($185 million USD) in funding, throwing fuel on the fire for its subscription commerce platform. And as the current global situation has forced businesses around the globe to rapidly transition online, service provders like AppDirect knows their services are in demand.

The Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) led the round with participation from existing investors. The new cash means AppDirect has now raised approximately $465 million USD.

The last time we heard from AppDirect, which has offices in Montreal, it had raised $140 million in 2015. The company is led by cofounders Daniel Saks, of St. Catherines, Ontario, and Nicolas Desmarais of Montreal. Desmarais is part of the powerful Canadian family of the same name. The late Paul Desmarais was one of the great empire builders of the Canadian business world, while sons Andre and Paul Jr. run PowerCorp, the massive Canadian financial services company.

Since that 2015 funding, AppDirect says it has increased Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) more than 1,500 percent since 2015 to over US$1 billion. The company said it is expanding its global footprint and servicing more than 2000 merchants around the globe.

“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,” said Daniel Saks, President and Co-CEO of AppDirect. “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.’

AppDirect offers a subscription commerce platform that removes the complexity of building a recurring business model. It helps businesses sell any product, through any channel, on any device - as a service. It powers millions of subscriptions worldwide for organizations like Jaguar Land Rover, Comcast, Sage, Keller Williams, and ADP.

However, the company insists that many companies around the worls are running into the limits of their subscription billing tools. This makes it difficult to bring products to market quickly, creating a disjointed customer experience, and creating management challenges.

AppDirect says companies need to support full subscription commerce. This transition includes integrating commerce flows from any online or off-line sales channels while meeting customer demand for tools and services.

As more Business-to-Business (B2B) companies make this shift, the 2020s are set to become “the era of B2B subscription commerce,” said AppDirect in a release. Public cloud offerings have made software as a service (SaaS) ubiquitous, and B2B companies now are looking at subscription models for anything that can be monetized based on value rather than ownership.

In fact, the IMARC Group predicts that the global anything as a service subscription market will grow to over US$340 billion by 2024, with a compound annualized growth rate of approximately 24 percent.

“AppDirect solutions are becoming increasingly popular with organizations that rely on a large, ever-changing list of software to perform most of their basic tasks,” said Inovia’s Chris Arsenault. “AppDirect has a proven business model and a solid client base that uses its platform daily to run their core operations.”

“AppDirect has established itself as the world leader in the application market for cloud services delivery. They are experiencing rapid growth, and the quality of its client network illustrates the success of its model,” said the CDPQ’s Thomas Birch. “AppDirect plays a key role in simplifying the digitalization of businesses through cloud services.”