The latest addition to the billion-dollar valuation club is a six-year-old startup called AppDirect Inc. that raised $140 million in a funding round announced this morning to do for the enterprise what the App Store did for mobile content consumption. The difference is the breadth of the challenge that it’s attempting to solve.

Requiring developers to sell their applications through a tightly-controlled central marketplace enabled Apple Inc. to check off its users’ two biggest concerns when consuming software, namely convenience and security, with a single stroke. But copying that model in an everyday organization that lacks such influence on its cloud providers isn’t nearly as simple, which is where AppDirect comes into the picture.

Its namesake platform allows administrators to make company-approved services available to their users through a custom catalog that functions much like the App Store on the front-end and adds management capabilities such as centralized billing at the back. That is a major boom for enterprises with upwards of thousands of employees each using several different solutions.

The system, which is based on subscription management technology that AppDirect gained through the purchase of a fellow startup called jBilling Inc. three years ago, doubles as a cost control panel that administrators can use to set caps on cloud usage. That’s particularly useful for regulating infrastructure-as-a-service deployments that are charged directly according to consumption rather than based on a fixed fee per user that is more difficult to abuse. 

The $140 million investment will enable AppDirect to significantly expand upon that functionality, presumably through a combination of internal development and additional acquisitions funded by the new capital. That should lead to a significant increase in its headcount, which already doubled to more 350 over the past year against the backdrop of its user base tripling to over a million subscribers.

In that context, it’s not hard to see why investors are willing to put so much of their money behind AppDirect. The round was led by J. P. Morgan Asset Management and saw contributions from all of the startup’s existing backers, among them billionaire Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management LLC.

Image via AppDirect