Although currently based in San Francisco, AppDirect was founded by two Canadian entrepreneurs, Nicolas Desmarais and Daniel Saks. Today at the Under the Radar Conference, AppDirect launched officially and announced a $3.25M seed round led by iNovia Capital. The full list of investors is listed on AppDirect’s site and includes prominent angels Hamnett Hill, Eric Boyko, Francois Charles Sirois and others.
AppDirect is as a free and private network that provides businesses with a single place to subscribe to applications, provision access to their colleagues, and pay just one monthly bill for all of their app subscriptions. With its launch, AppDirect has enabled users to begin signing up and start browsing through its growing inventory of applications. To help navigate through the offering, AppDirect has developed an intelligent recommendation engine that guides users towards the most relevant apps for their business.
Developers can distribute their applications through the Network by connecting to the AppDirect API. AppDirect seeks to extend the distribution reach for its application developers through its branded Marketplace-as-a-Service platform. Their first white-labeled marketplace, the Bell Business Apps Store, was launched by Canada’s largest telecommunications company to service their significant base of SMB clients.
“Hundreds of incredible Software-as-a-Service applications exist today that help businesses operate more efficiently. Unfortunately, businesses have been slow to adopt SaaS because they have been unable to discover relevant applications and manage them in a single location.” said President and co-founder Daniel Saks. “We believe our solution will reinvent the way businesses find, buy, and use applications in one seamless experience.”
“With new Channel Partnerships coming this year, AppDirect will provide a single point of integration for Application Developers to reach millions of businesses across the world,” says Daniel Saks. “For Channel Partners, it represents the fastest and most economical way to offer cloud services to their existing customer base.”
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