November 1, 2021

Apollo.io Raises $32M in Series B Funding to Make B2B Sales Prospecting More Intelligent, Automated and Accessible

Written by Tim Zheng

We founded Apollo.io so any business, no matter how large or small, can find their ideal prospects and convert them into customers. How? By making go-to-market simple and intelligent, building a world-class all-in-one platform, where anybody can plugin, build, and execute their strategy.

And today, we achieved a new milestone towards that vision, with our successful Series B fundraise of $32M led by Tribe Capital, with participation from investors, NewView Capital and Nexus.

When I founded my first start-up in 2011, we had built a great product but it was hard to grow our user base. We got stuck at around 5,000 users and although we bought a lot of sales tools, we were not moving the needle. 

So we decided to build our own sales prospecting tool and went from 5,000 to 150,000 users in just 5 weeks. We ended up having over a million users at BrainGenie just before I started Apollo.

That’s how Apollo.io was born.

Today, for B2B companies, GTM execution is manual, tedious, and complex. Sales reps have to do way too many activities and operate in too many siloed systems. And the whole sales process is very expensive.

It may be easier to just blast emails and spam people, but it’s not effective. It’s smarter and more effective to send the right message to the right people at the right time –and at scale. 

That is exactly what Apollo does, making smart go-to-market simple, for anybody to figure out who in the universe of millions of contacts to go after and reach out to them with the best message, with just a few clicks.

Apollo GMT process

Over the last 12 months, we have seen rapid adoption of our lead intelligence and sales engagement platform by individual sales professionals, sales teams, and marketing organizations. 

Here are some of the highlights of this past year:

  • Our recurring revenue has tripled and our customer base has increased to over 8,000 paying customers. 
  • We have added over one million sign-ups for our platform. 
  • The number of weekly active users of Apollo.io has increased nearly 400%.
  • We released major product updates, including contact and account intelligence, an international dialer, a prospecting rules engine, and a revamp of the very popular Apollo.io LinkedIn extension.

We have come a long way since we started. Not only do we have the world’s most accurate data, powered by our algorithms and our user base of half a million contributors, but reviewers say it is the easiest to use platform for data and GTM out there.

Apollo G2 Review

However, not a lot of people have heard about us but many more businesses can benefit from using Apollo.io. Our next steps include increasing awareness of Apollo, increasing our user base outside of small teams,  and building out an intelligence layer in Apollo to make individual sales reps and teams more successful.

That’s why I’m so excited about the Series B funding!

This funding will help us further accelerate our growth and product innovation, making our platform even simpler but more robust and intelligent.

We will invest in product, marketing, and engineering and further strengthen the product’s sales intelligence and engagement capabilities.

I want to thank our users and customers for making Apollo the great platform and company that it is today. I appreciate all the love that we got from our customers. Here are just some examples:

“Most cost-efficient sales tool” – Nick D

“Great functionality / Intuitive UI” – Olek K

“Saves time and energy in finding ideal leads” – Devendra B

It’s Apollo’s mission to bring them the most simple, powerful, and intelligent GTM platform in the industry, so they can reach their full market potential.

You will hear from us about how we’ll make access to B2B data even more accessible and how you can make workflows more intelligent and effective. Stay tuned!

Tim Zheng

Tim is the Founder and CEO of Apollo.