Subscription commerce platform AppDirect acquires TBI

AppDirect, a San Francisco-based subscription commerce platform for monetizing and managing digital customer relationships, announced today it has acquired TBI, one of the leading technology service aggregators in North America. The total amount of the deal was not disclosed.

Uniting the forces of AppDirect and TBI will enable advisors to accelerate growth through an extensive multi-category catalog, the ability to offer more value-added services, and exceptional customer service. This acquisition will provide advisors with industry-leading digital tools to help their businesses to find, buy, and manage technology.

AppDirect also said the acquisition will also bring the best of both companies to advisors and their customers. “TBI’s reputation for stellar support and education, and for building outstanding relationships among advisors and providers, complement AppDirect’s world-leading platform that 10,000 advisors and 5 million subscribers rely on to run and grow their business,” the company added.

The acquisition comes at a time in the post-pandemic B2B technology landscape when advisors are increasingly at the center of SMBs’ buying decisions. “As business buyers struggle to make the best technology choices in a complex and crowded technology environment, many of them believe they can achieve better ROI from their technology choices if they work with an advisor. At the same time, a growing number of business buyers are looking to purchase their tech solutions from a marketplace where they can single-source all of the products they need,” AppDirect said in a statement.

We covered AppDirect back about two years ago after it received an $80 million investment from CDPQ for the launch of AppDirect Capital, a program that offers a set of innovative funding programs dedicated to the growth and transformation of channel partners.

Founded in 2009 by Daniel Saks and Nicolas Desmarais, AppDirect is the only subscription commerce platform for selling, distributing, and managing cloud-based products and services to succeed in the digital economy. The AppDirect cloud service commerce platform unites providers, developers, and consumers of cloud services into a single ecosystem. This makes it easy for businesses to find, buy, manage, and monitor cloud services from a central location and delivers new opportunities to distribute, sell, and market cloud services.

AppDirect-powered marketplaces, billing and distribution, and reselling services help providers – including Telstra, ADP, Samsung, Deutsche Telekom, and others – connect millions of businesses to solutions from Microsoft, Google, Box, and more. We talked briefly about AppDirect after one of its investors, Inovia Capital raised $600 million for its early-and growth-stage funds.

Since its funding round in 2015, AppDirect has experienced tremendous growth across all indicators – increasing Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) by more than 1500 percent since 2015 to over US$1 billion, expanding its global footprint, and servicing more than 2000 merchants around the globe. The new funding supports accelerated organic expansion, strategic acquisitions, and additional hiring.