Canadian-founded, San Francisco-based AppDirect has acquired Toronto’s PartnerStack, which provides partner relationship management (PRM) software and a network of business-to-business (B2B) partners.
The deal was announced today. Both firms declined to disclose the financial terms to BetaKit. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one source familiar with the transaction indicated to BetaKit the deal was valued between $150 million and $250 million USD (approximately $206 million and $343 million CAD). A second source told BetaKit the deal was just over $150 million USD and consisted primarily of AppDirect stock.
AppDirect, which helps other firms buy, sell, and manage recurring tech services, and PartnerStack have been familiar with each other for more than a decade. AppDirect says the deal will help it create “the unified subscription commerce platform for partner-led growth.”
“We didn’t sell because the market was tough. We sold because this was the biggest partnership we could build.”
Bryn Jones, PartnerStack
“We’ve always admired the ecosystem that they’ve made,” AppDirect senior vice-president of corporate development Andy Ellerhorst told BetaKit over email. “As we’ve been building out AppDirect’s vision to become the everything store for B2B distribution, it became clear that PartnerStack’s partner network and PRM platform was the missing piece. They had built exactly what the market needed—a way to recruit, manage, and pay partners at scale.”
Noting that PartnerStack’s B2B partner network is already driving “real revenue” for firms like Freshworks, Monday.com, and Stripe, Ellerhorst added, “the strategic fit was obvious.”
PartnerStack co-founder and CEO Bryn Jones echoed that assertion. “PartnerStack gives AppDirect the leading PRM and the largest B2B partner network in the world,” Jones told BetaKit in an email. “It immediately expands the value proposition for both our customers and theirs.”
The strategic acquisition unites PartnerStack’s network of more than 138,000 B2B partners and PRM offering with AppDirect’s marketplace infrastructure, giving businesses a single platform to launch, run, and scale partner-led growth.
AppDirect serves more than 1,000 tech providers, 14,000 advisors, and 16 million subscribers. The firm announced last August that it anticipates the company will cross $1 billion USD in gross annual recurring revenue within the next two years.
PartnerStack’s 110 employees have joined AppDirect, which is retaining the company’s leadership team and its operations in Toronto. This deal marks the sixth acquisition that AppDirect has announced in 10 months. This flurry of deals includes the purchase of another Canadian company, Kirkland, Quebec-based energy brokerage DNE Resources.
PartnerStack, which was founded in 2015 by Jones, Luke Swanek, Neil Chudleigh and Jon Mendes under the name GrowSumo, made a name for itself by helping software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies grow through partnerships.
Amid fears of an AI-driven “SaaSpocalypse,” AppDirect says what is clear is that the tech has cut the cost of software development and made AI search visibility “the new battleground.”
In line with a forecast from UK tech research firm Omdia, AppDirect is betting that in the agentic AI era, an increasing percentage of enterprise SaaS sales will come via channel partners and the firms that make distribution a core part of their strategy will own the market.
RELATED: Why many of Canada’s tech centaurs are in no rush to go public
“AI is making it trivially easy to build software, which means the companies that win won’t be the best builders,” Ellerhorst said. “They’ll be the ones that control how their product gets found, recommended, and purchased. That’s exactly why we built this platform and ecosystem.”
PartnerStack, whose last publicized round was a $29-million USD Series B in 2021, had raised $50 million USD in total funding from New York City’s 3L, and RRE Ventures, Toronto’s Whitecap Venture Partners, and Boston-based HarbourVest Partners, and San Francisco’s Y Combinator, among others. The company also shed 20 percent of its staff in 2023 as macroeconomic conditions deteriorated.
PartnerStack’s 110 employees have joined AppDirect, which is retaining its operations in Toronto.
“After the Series B, the market shifted and we made the hard decision to right-size the team in 2023,” Jones said. “That was painful but it was the right call. What happened after is the important part. We didn’t raise again. Not a dollar. We got disciplined and built a business that could grow on its own terms.”
Jones said PartnerStack’s growth accelerated every quarter since then, noting that the company has crossed $3 billion in customer revenue through its platform, and seen transaction volume grow 52 percent year-over-year, and paid customer conversions spike 112 percent.
Since AI has dramatically slashed the cost of building software, Jones said the market has been flooded with options, leaving many buyers overwhelmed. He argued that amid these conditions, showing up in AI search, leveraging trusted voices, and meeting purchasers where decisions are made has become particularly important. “That’s exactly what PartnerStack does and it’s why our growth has been accelerating.”
When PartnerStack leadership reconnected with AppDirect in 2024, the CEO said “it became clear pretty quickly that [the two companies] were better together.”
“We didn’t sell because the market was tough,” Jones said. “We sold because this was the biggest partnership we could build.”
UPDATE (04/16/26): This story has been updated to include additional reporting on the deal as well as information and commentary shared by PartnerStack co-founder and CEO Bryn Jones and AppDirect SVP of corporate development Andy Ellerhorst.
Feature image courtesy PartnerStack.