The first day of spring was a bright one for Chargebee, a SaaS-based subscription management and recurring billing solution provider, who announced they had raised $18 million in Series C funding. Led by Insight Venture Partners, the funding round also included investments from past investors Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management. Total funding raised to date is now $24.7 million. The new capital will be used for product R&D, sales, marketing and aggressive expansion into newer markets and segments.

‘Worldwide, we see a strong trend in subscription businesses with innovative pricing and product bundling. Building a sustainable recurring revenue business is hard. It requires merchants to continuously deliver product value and customer service. And that makes billing a mission critical system, that provides the flexibility needed to build a scalable business – on one side enabling a fluid customer experience, while on the other, ensuring compliance in an increasingly regulated global economy,’ said Chargebee CEO and co-founder Krish Subramanian in a news release.

‘With Insight’s support, Chargebee’s new investment will be channelized towards furthering our goal to democratize billing and subscription management, and empower teams to create customer-first subscription experiences, without the developer dependencies that exist in most systems today,’ added Subramanian. ‘We help our customers launch their business and grow into new countries, without having to worry about compliance, tax rules, language, currency, and even new revenue models. We take a lot of pride in remaining behind the scenes while powering our customer’s businesses. We want to be the AWS of Subscription Billing.’

As part of the deal, Harley Miller, vice president at Insight Venture Partners in New York, will join Chargebee’s board of directors.

‘Chargebee delivers a broader and deeper subscription billing management solution built for both non-technical business users as well as developers. As a firm, we are long on recurring revenue businesses. Chargebee is poised to capitalize on this trend, as its solution is both robust and easy to use for SMB and enterprise clients alike. We are very excited to partner with such a highly talented, ambitious team,’ said Miller.

Founded in 2011, Chargebee offers subscription management, billing and invoicing, payments and accounting, and reporting and analytics services to subscription companies. It serves more than 7,000 customers including Calendly, Vinyl Me, Please, Freshworks, Fujitsu, Study.com, Freshdesk, Linux Academy and Sharetribe. Chargebee also supports a range of payment gateways including Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, GoCardless, Authorize.Net, Worldpay, Adyen and Amazon Payments.

Chargebee operates under a subscription model as well, with pricing based on the amount of revenue processed each month. Popular plans range from $99 a month (to process $25,000 revenue monthly) to $599 a month (to process $75,000 revenue monthly). Free plans are available for new businesses, and enterprise pricing is customized to large organizations’ specific needs. Chargebee can also tailor plans based on invoice-based pricing.

This news comes just a few days after subscription startup Zuora filed for a $100 million IPO. Zuora, also a SaaS-based subscription management and billing platform, was last valued at $738 million by Pitchbook in 2015.

Insider Take:

With the proliferation of companies using the subscription model, there is a growing need for cloud-based subscription management and billing solutions offered by companies like Chargebee. While the company is significantly smaller than Zuora, Chargebee has great potential and its own unique value proposition and set of offerings for clients around the world. This sizable investment will fund additional growth for Chargebee to continue its trajectory into the subscription management space.