Apollo.io, a San Francisco-based startup that provides a full-stack sales tech platform, has raised $100 million in a Series D funding round, reaching a valuation of $1.6 billion. The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Tribe Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners.
A Platform for Simplifying Go-to-Market Solutions
Apollo.io was founded in 2015 by Tim Zheng, Roy Chung, and Ray Li, who experienced the challenges of maintaining and expanding a small business while working at their first startup, BrainGenie, a math and science skills practice website. They realized that the traditional go-to-market tech stack was overstuffed with disparate tools that were complex to set up, difficult to integrate, and cost-prohibitive for most businesses.
To solve this problem, they built Apollo.io, a platform that combines sales intelligence and execution workflows with a business-to-business (B2B) buyer database of over 270 million verified contacts. The platform enables companies to find and target new leads, enrich their first-party data, and automate their sales and marketing processes. Apollo.io also offers an AI-powered assistant tool that sends more relevant and personalized emails to sales prospects, based on data from Apollo.io’s B2B database and buying intent signals.
Rapid Growth and Product Development
Apollo.io claims that it has grown its revenue by 9x in the last two years and works with more than 500,000 companies, including Adobe, Zoom, Shopify, Slack, and Twilio. The company has also released 20 new go-to-market workflows in the last year, aiming to centralize the entire go-to-market stack for businesses of all sizes.
“In line with our mission to make world-class go-to-market solutions simple and accessible to all, we have experienced unprecedented product-led growth during a time of economic uncertainty,” said co-founder and CEO Tim Zheng in a press release. “Our investors, led by Bain Capital Ventures, bring a new level of sophistication to the table that will accelerate Apollo.io’s journey from startup to scaleup.”
With the new funding, Apollo plans to invest more in product and R&D efforts, as well as expanding its team from 450 employees to 1,000 across engineering, marketing, design product legal and people operations by 2025. The company also intends to explore new markets and verticals, such as healthcare, education, and government.
A Rising Star in the Sales Tech Space
Apollo.io is one of the first sales tech unicorns minted in 2023, joining the ranks of other high-profile startups in the space such as Outreach, Gong, SalesLoft, and Databricks. According to Crunchbase data , funding to U.S.-based sales tech startups has been in a lull this year, with about $550 million going to such companies. Last year saw $2.8 billion raised by such startups even as the venture market slowed.
However, Apollo.io’s impressive growth and valuation show that there is still strong demand for innovative solutions that can help businesses streamline their go-to-market strategies and increase their sales efficiency and effectiveness.
