Startup Chargebee Inc. is now worth $3.5 billion, more than double the valuation it received last April, after closing a $250 million funding round led by Tiger Global and Sequoia.

Chargebee said in its announcement of the investment today that a number of existing backers, including Insight Partners, Sapphire and Steadview Capital, participated as well. The San Francisco-based startup has raised more than $460 million from investors since launch.

Chargebee provides a cloud platform that software-as-a-service firms and other companies use to sell subscriptions. With the startup’s platform, a company can enable its customers to purchase subscriptions using multiple payment methods across more than 100 currencies.

Alongside its core feature set for managing customer purchases, Chargebee provides an array of other tools to help with related tasks.

Application interface development is one of the areas where the startup promises to assist its customers. Chargebee offers packaged software building blocks that a firm can use to quickly build an e-commerce checkout page for buying subscriptions. Additionally, the startup’s platform enables companies to set up a self-service portal through which application users can manage their subscriptions.

Chargebee is targeting a growing market with its platform. Many software firms that historically sold their applications through one-time licenses are switching to a subscription-centric business model. One reason for the switch is that subscriptions are a more predictable source of revenue than licenses, since customers commit in advance to spending a certain predetermined sum. The ability to anticipate revenue more easily is especially beneficial for publicly traded firms, which must regularly share sales forecasts with investors.

Yet despite the benefits, measuring revenue can be difficult even for companies that generate most of their sales through subscriptions. A large tech firm might have a half-dozen subscription-based cloud services, each with multiple pricing plans.

Chargebee offers a set of revenue analytics features that it says can enable companies to measure recurring revenue more easily. The startup’s platform tracks metrics such as average revenue per subscription and customer churn. One use for the data surfaced by Chargebee is evaluating the effectiveness of customer acquisition efforts. A tech company could, for example, run analyses to determine the extent to which an initiative such as a marketing campaign improved key revenue metrics. 

Chargebee says the more than 4,000 companies using its platform range from publicly traded tech firms such as Okta Inc. and Freshworks Inc. to emerging startups. For software companies, using an external cloud platform to manage subscription sales removes the need to build the necessary software from scratch, which saves a great deal of time. The same resources can then be invested into developing new features.

Another benefit of not building everything from scratch is simplified code maintenance. If a company builds custom software to manage subscription purchases, it has to manage technical tasks such as applying cybersecurity updates in-house. Using an external subscription management platform reduces the amount of custom code that companies have to maintain and thereby simplifies day-to-day operations.

“We built Chargebee to solve infrastructure issues facing high-growth subscription businesses with a product roadmap laser focused on replacing in-house systems orchestrating the complex parts of revenue intelligence like billing and payments,” said Chargebee co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Krish Subramanian. “As subscription offerings continue to rapidly evolve, our focus remains on providing a flexible growth engine to power, capture and understand revenue, all in real time.”

Following its latest $250 million funding round, Chargebee plans to expand product development efforts and grow its global presence. The startup said another part of the newly raised funds will go toward “strategic corporate growth initiatives,” which may include acquisitions. Chargebee announced its latest acquisition, of customer retention startup Brightback Inc., only a few weeks ago. 

Image: Chargebee