Salesforce Ventures made the biggest investment in its six years of operation this morning as part of a $108 million round into a little-known partner called Apttus Inc. that has quietly risen to prominence in the billing management space. That handily beats the previous record, the $41 million capital infusion that the cloud giant led into the startup only a quarter ago.

Handling the logistics of charging a customer for a product isn’t exactly the most exciting part of running a business, but it’s as essential a chore as any other that is subject to the same underlying operational imperative: speed. The faster a company can clear a deal, the sooner its salespeople can turn their attention to the others waiting in the pipeline.

But that’s a lot easier said than done for the likes of General Electric Co., one of the many global enterprises using Salesforce.com’s namesake customer relationship platform, which have an unholy amount of details to work out before every transaction. Selling a wind turbine, for instance, involves not only the initial purchase but also the ongoing supply of spare parts needed to maintain it, support and potential upgrades.

That’s where Apttus comes in with its service, which integrates capabilities for handling such complicated transactions directly into Salesforce.com. The cloud giant tried to compete with the startup for a while, but eventually gave up its homegrown quote-to-cash functionality and handed over the reins entirely.

In addition to features for setting pricing and ongoing obligations, Apttus also provides the ability to make the details of each transaction easily accessible to all the necessary parties across the sales, accounting and legal departments. That kind of cross-division coordination hardly comes for granted in large organizations with upwards of thousands of employees scattered across multiple geographies.

The new $108 million in funding, which also includes contributions from K1 Capital, Iconiq Capital and KIA, will be used to add more features to the mix and expand adoption. Apttus intends to double down on hiring too with plans to close the year at a headcount of over 1,000, quadruple the number of employees it had in 2013.

Photo via Geralt