AppDirect Secures $50 Million In Series D Funding

AppDirect made a huge channel play a couple of months ago and now the cloud marketplace vendor has secured $50 million in additional funding to accelerate its push into a global network of solution providers and distribution partners.

The Series D round involved a number of the San Francisco-based startups existing investors: Mithril Capital Management, Foundry Group, iNovia Capital and StarVest Partners. New investors Henry Kravis and Paul Fribourg joined the round, Daniel Saks, the company's co-CEO, told CRN Wednesday.

AppDirect offers a popular platform that its partners can use to build self-branded online marketplaces from which business customers can select and manage their cloud application portfolios. The first batch of AppDirect's channel partners were huge businesses representing global telecom, cloud infrastructure, retail and financial powerhouses.

But AppDirect made a play for a wider channel in December by launching a program called Reseller Management Service that aims to recruit the downstream channels of its existing partners.

[Related: AppDirect Reveals New Reseller Management Services At Cloud Channel Summit]

The shift from exclusively working with Tier 1 providers to smaller IT shops has been met with "explosive global interest" and AppDirect now is looking to build off that success, Saks told CRN.

"So now we really want to scale our business footprint, especially in markets like Latin America and Asia," Saks told CRN.

As AppDirect looks to again double year-over-year revenue, the Series D funding will be used to expand global market share by scaling sales, marketing and client services teams to connect more effectively with thousands of solution providers in many countries.

Saks said increasing demand for the platform is what encouraged existing investors to commit more cash and new investors to get involved in funding AppDirect.

"We're really focused on investing in an omni-channel experience across VARs, resellers and other types of distributors," Saks told CRN.

"This funding further enables us to achieve these objectives for all types of cloud services to be distributed across all kinds of verticals across all channels to all sorts of businesses," he said.

PUBLISHED FEB. 11, 2015