APOLLO.IO

Apollo.io did not start with its current name. Tim Zheng launched it in 2015 as ZenProspect.

The first idea was to help companies find and reach the right sales prospects. Zheng had been a growth guy himself and knew how painful and expensive good contact data was.

Most sales teams paid huge fees to data providers just to get a list of phone numbers and emails. ZenProspect set out to make that data cheap and easy to get.

In 2018 the company rebranded to Apollo.io and went all in on a single bet. Make world-class sales data affordable for everyone, not just big companies with big budgets.

Apollo runs on a freemium model. Anyone can sign up for free and start searching its giant database of business contacts.

You get a limited number of credits to start. When you need more contacts, more emails, or the advanced tools, you pay for a subscription.

It is priced per user per month, and it is famously cheaper than the enterprise data giants. So the model is simple.

Hook millions of salespeople with free data. Convert a slice of them into paying customers.

Then sell them more as their teams grow.

The heart of Apollo is its B2B database, with data on more than 270 million contacts and millions of companies. On top of that sits the engagement layer, where reps run email sequences, make calls, and track every interaction.

There is also a Chrome extension that pulls contact details straight from LinkedIn and company websites. More recently Apollo added AI tools that help write outreach and score which leads are worth chasing.

The pitch is one platform to find buyers, reach them, and close them.

Apollo grew the way modern software wins. From the bottom up.

Instead of selling to executives in boardrooms, it let individual salespeople sign up for free and try it themselves. They liked it, told their teammates, and whole companies got pulled in one user at a time.

The free database was the bait. It cost far less than ZoomInfo or its rivals, which made switching a no-brainer for budget-conscious teams.

The result was explosive. Revenue grew 9x in two years and the platform crossed 3 million users at over 500,000 companies.

Price plus product-led growth did the heavy lifting.

The big question hanging over Apollo is data quality and trust. Cheaper data can mean messier data.

Contacts move jobs, emails go stale, and rivals love to argue that you get what you pay for. There are also privacy and compliance headaches.

Holding hundreds of millions of personal business records invites scrutiny under laws like GDPR. And the giants are not sitting still.

ZoomInfo and others can drop prices or copy features. Apollo's challenge is to prove that cheap data can also be good data, at massive scale, without ending up in legal trouble.

Apollo raised about $250 million from a who's who of venture firms. Nexus Venture Partners and Tribe Capital backed the earlier rounds.

The big validation came in March 2022 when Sequoia Capital led a $110 million Series C. Sequoia does not write checks like that lightly.

Then in August 2023, Bain Capital Ventures led a $100 million Series D that valued Apollo at $1.6 billion, nearly doubling its worth and minting it a unicorn. The backers are betting that affordable sales data is a huge, underserved market.