Apollo is a sales intelligence and engagement platform founded in 2015 by Tim Zheng, Ray Li, and Roy Chung, originally as ZenProspect. It combines a B2B contact and company database with prospecting, enrichment, sequencing, and deal-management tooling, giving sales teams a single system to find, engage, and close buyers. The platform is used by hundreds of thousands of companies and competes across the 📝Go-to-Market (GTM) data and sales-engagement categories.
Apollo's wedge was bundling a large prospecting database with the outbound engagement layer that historically lived in separate tools, undercutting incumbents on price while consolidating the workflow. After nearly running out of cash, the company scaled to roughly $100M ARR within 24 months and continued past $150M ARR, raising a $100M Series D in 2023 led by Bain Capital Ventures at a $1.6B valuation, with prior backing from Sequoia Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. Its database-plus-engagement model positions it directly against point solutions for contact data and sales sequencing alike.