Apollo.io intelligence platform
One of the bigger impacts of COVID-19 has been that more business than ever before is now being carried out online. To meet that opportunity, today a startup called Apollo.io has raised $110 million.
Apollo built an all-in-one sales intelligence and engagement platform to find sales prospects from a database of 220 million would-be buyers, build out deeper insights on them and their organizations by matching that database to a company’s own data and wider information sources, and then sell to them virtually.
This Series C was led by Sequoia Capital, with previous backers Tribe Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and NewView Capital also participating. Apollo CEO and co-founder Tim Zheng said the company was not disclosing its valuation with this round, but PitchBook — which records this round as closing more than a month ago, in January — notes that it is $910 million post-money. Update: We’ve now confirmed with another source at Apollo that it is $900 million post-money, a big leap considering the ups and downs that the company has faced over the years, including a rebrand and a data breach.
The funding comes on the heels of a period of strong growth for Apollo. Zheng told me that over 160,000 companies are now using its sales tools, working out to around 1 million individuals in all. Not all of these are paying users — it operates on a freemium model — but since its Series B in November, the company said it has seen its paying segment rise by 60% to 16,000+ businesses (up from 9,000). That still works out to 10% of its total user base, but it’s moving in the right direction.
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Apollo’s rise, and this funding round, is also a notable case study in how companies that have built effective tools can grow under challenging circumstances. COVID-19 definitely heralded a shift to more business being done virtually, lending more credibility to online channels and generating a lot more demand for tools like Apollo’s.
But Apollo — which first had its start as a product called ZenProspect, which was incubated at Y Combinator and found strong early traction while still there among tech companies and others in its cohort — was definitely not the only one in what has become a pretty crowded space. Competitors include SalesLoft, Cognism, Reply.io, ZoomInfo, HubSpot and Outreach, among many others, delivering either more focused point solutions or — like Apollo — aiming to provide a wider all-in-one experience covering different aspects of a salesperson’s IT toolkit.
Apollo’s pitch is that it is providing a more compelling product to the market on a couple of levels.
Apollo.io intelligence platform
