AppDirect, a San Francisco- and Montreal-based platform for buying, selling and managing tech through a network of IT advisors, has raised $100 million from CDPQ to expand its financing program for small- and medium-sized tech businesses.
With CDPQ’s investment, AppDirect will bring together tech providers, advisors and buyers through its Capital Invest fund, the company says — helping get tech companies’ products in front of prospective customers.
“Our Invest program is purpose-built to empower our technology advisors,” Emanuel Bertolin, AppDirect’s chief revenue officer, said in a statement. “To keep up with today’s ever-changing market, technology merchants need fast access to capital to accelerate their growth.”
AppDirect’s Capital Invest program is a loan program, providing capital for tech businesses in the form of upfront payments. To apply, firms submit their business data from the last three years. AppDirect then delivers an all-cash offer, as well as back-office support and provider contracts, based on the firm’s annual recurring revenue.
After the loan’s closing, businesses begin making annuity payments to AppDirect, which continue in perpetuity.
“With AppDirect Capital, tech advisors can take advantage of innovative capital options to expand their business or invest in the future, which makes increasing access to this program all the more essential,” Bertolin said.
AppDirect was founded in 2009 by Nicolas Desmarais and Dan Saks, who set out to build a platform that could connect business owners with tech — particularly cloud tech — while abstracting away the traditional onboarding processes. Today, AppDirect offers a set of tools that let businesses monetize — or buy — tech products across a range of different channels and devices.
“Our large network of tech advisors refer or resell business solutions to their customers from our catalog of business-to-business (B2B) products,” Desmarais explained to TechCrunch in an email interview. “Providers … develop, provision, invoice, deploy and support the services they offer. Tech providers and many enterprises also use the AppDirect marketplace platform to power their own custom B2B commerce ecosystems.”
AppDirect makes money through its monetization services for businesses in addition to transaction fees through products and services bought and sold through its platform.
“The market is inundated with a multitude of technologies and solutions, and knowing the best solutions can be challenging if you don’t have the required experts on staff,” Desmarais said. “We support the ability to help businesses monetize their products and services through their own white-labeled marketplace platform. We also provide the opportunity for our advisor community to procure technology for their customers directly from the AppDirect catalog.”
AppDirect launched the Capital Invest program in 2021. With the $100 million investment, it now totals $180 million in size — a fraction of the nearly half a billion dollars in debt and equity that AppDirect has raised so far from investors, including JPMorgan Chase, Mithril Capital Management and Inovia Capital.