Our $100 Million Series D: The Future of GTM with Apollo.io

It’s been a busy but rewarding year since I wrote about our Series C funding.

Now, I’m excited to announce that we have raised $100 million in Series D funding led by Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), with participation from existing investors, Sequoia Capital, Tribe Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners.

This investment nearly doubles Apollo.io’s valuation since our last raise, now at $1.6 billion.

Over the last two years, we have grown revenue 9x and currently serve over three million GTM professionals at over 500,000 companies from startups to global enterprises like Qualtrics, Customer.io, and Census.

So how are we growing even during harsh macroeconomic conditions?

It’s simple: we’ve been investing in creating the best product for sales and marketing teams to go to market.

In the last year alone we’ve released over 20 new sales execution solutions to help you:

• Find the perfect leads
• Engage with leads
• Win more business
• Enrich your CRM

Our dedication to product-led growth and making go-to-market accessible, attainable, and easy to use has amounted to massive word-of-mouth growth, driving Apollo to become the most loved, fastest-growing sales technology on the market.

If you haven’t checked out Apollo in a while, I encourage you to do so by just logging into Apollo, or scheduling a chat with our sales team to see what’s new in the last year.

If you'd like to keep reading, I'd love to share our journey, my gratitude, and some observations.

Apollo.io Through the Years

Apollo was born from my personal experience in building and scaling a startup.

Our previous solution had hit a wall at 5,000 users and off-the-shelf sales tools proved to have inadequate data quality, unwieldy workflows, limited integrations, and nearly prohibitive pricing.

So we created our own in-house unified go-to-market platform, laying the foundation for Apollo.io's evolution into the ultimate consolidated GTM solution.

Needless to say, our home-grown tool skyrocketed sign-ups. 

When I learned that other business leaders faced similar, negative experiences with their sales tech, I knew that what we had built had the potential to reinvent the market.

So, in 2015 I officially launched Apollo.io. 

Over the years, the team and I have been hard at work, building everything in-house and from the ground up. We expanded Apollo.io’s B2B database, built new sales execution solutions on the platform, grew our team, and onboarded millions of new users around the world.

Recent Momentum for Apollo.io

Over the last 12 months, we have defied the odds of a down market and experienced unprecedented growth — the significance of which is not lost on me.

• Over 3 million users across 500,000 companies have signed up for Apollo.io.
• Apollo.io is now the No. 1 ranked Sales Intelligence and Sales Engagement solution on G2.
• Apollo.io is trusted by 40,000 paying customers, from rapidly growing startups to some of the largest global enterprises. Half of our revenue is generated internationally.
• We more than doubled our headcount in 2023 and plan to grow to 1,000 team members by 2025 across engineering, marketing, design, product, legal, and people operations — an increase of 122 percent.
• We have added a roster of senior executives and released new products to help businesses generate pipeline, win more deals, improve team performance, and operationalize their GTM – all-in-one integration solution.
• We’ve built all our products in-house with the intention of creating an interconnected tech stack that learns from itself, a major factor in our becoming the world's preferred consolidated GTM tech stack and the leading provider of accurate B2B buyer data. 

All of this has come together to create premier experiences for our users and their buyers.

Watching these customers, like Collin Stewart at Predictable Revenue who streamlined his team’s go-to-market while cutting costs by over 50%, is what inspires us to continue to invest our resources into our product.

Series D led by Bain Capital Ventures

In a time when Series D funding is down almost 80%, we are thrilled to partner with such an incredible group of investors for our most recent funding. This round is led by Bain Capital Ventures and joined by Sequoia Capital, Tribe Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners.

“Tim and the Apollo team have built a remarkable B2B platform that we believe will redefine the next generation of go-to-market sales," says Merritt Hummer, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, "Once companies experience Apollo’s buyer database coupled with powerful automation tools for lead generation and beyond, they’re hooked. We see the company providing the foundation for GTM teams everywhere in the future, driving direct sales at an unprecedented scale".

We raised this round to further improve our platform, accelerate our growth, and grow our company to over 1,000 employees by 2025. This path, we believe, will enable us to best serve our customers. 

What’s Next for Apollo.io

At Apollo.io, serving the needs of our customers with product solutions has always been a top priority. We will continue to pursue this goal by creating the world’s most comprehensive, powerful, and intuitive unified tech stack for GTM professionals. 

Here’s how we plan to deliver on our vision:

• Hiring a world-class team: Apollo.io's success and position in the market have led to an influx of world-class tech talent. We recently added Leandra Fishman from Intercom and SendGrid/Twilio as our Chief Revenue Officer, Dzmitry Markovich from Dapper Labs and Dropbox as SVP of Engineering, and Shek Viswanathan from Qualtrics as our Chief Product Officer. This augments an already incredible Apollo.io team. 
• Improving the product: We are refining our product to make it easier to use, faster to implement, and more intelligent out-of-the-box.
• AI Workflows: AI is so much more than a writing tool. AI will fundamentally change the way we do sales. The hours that reps spend on repetitive tasks will be automated, AI-driven plays will enable “always on” intelligence workflows, and so much more. 
• Product-Led Growth: Apollo.io’s PLG motion has buoyed us over the last few years. We will continue to invest in a combined PLG + sales motion. We will also double down on PLG/self-service onboarding, support, and building systems to learn as much as possible from our customers. 

Thank you to every member of the Apollo.io community and team!