Online subscription commerce service Zuora is backing regional clients including Singapore Press Holdings with an office in the island state.

Zuora – which opened offices in office in London and Sydney in 2010 and 2012 – says more than a quarter of its business now comes from outside the US. It has increased international staff by more than 40 per cent in the last year to respond to increased opportunity in those markets.

The company began in 2007 with a vision of a ‘subscription economy’ in which companies would offer broad libraries of services via subscriptions instead of the traditional model of delivering products. In the last six years, the emergence of subscription-based services build around recurring revenue business models has caused a major transformation across multiple multi-billion dollar industries.

Apart from media, sectors impacted have included technology, consumer retail, telecommunications, financial services and healthcare services.

Zuora is backed by venture capitalists including Benchmark Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Index Ventures and Silicon Valley pioneer Marc Benioff.

The ‘subscription economy’ is now a $500 billion market, set to grow exponentially as innovations are increasingly delivered as services. A 2013 Economist Intelligence Unit survey found that four out of every five businesses are currently seeing changes in the way customers prefer to access services, and as a result more than half have integrated new pricing and delivery models.

It has also caught on in a big way in Singapore, seventh in this year's Bloomberg Global Innovation Index – where early adopter customers include Singapore Press Holdings, ViewQwest and PropertyGuru.