Apollo, a San Francisco-based sales software startup, today announced that it has raised $100 million after growing revenues by a factor of nine over the past two years. 

The Series D round was led by Bain Capital Ventures at a $1.6 billion valuation. That’s up from the $900 million Apollo was reportedly worth after its last raise, a $110 million investment announced in early 2022. Returning backers Sequoia Capital, Tribe Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners also contributed to the company’s latest round.

Sales teams typically use several different tools to manage their day-to-day work. A team might use one application to store data about deal opportunities, another to create lead outreach emails and a third to forecast revenue. Apollo, officially Zenleads Inc., provides a software platform that it says combines the features of multiple sales tools into a single product.

The platform offers access to the contact information of more than 270 million workers. It also provides information about those workers’ companies including their headcount, outside funding and other key details. Sales teams at a business-to-business firm can search the dataset to find companies that may be interested in buying their firm’s products.

Alongside sales information, Apollo’s platform provides data science tools to help customers put that information to use. One tool makes it easier to calculate a company’s total addressable market by identifying all the organizations that might buy its products in the future. Another feature helps companies fix potential issues in their existing sales datasets, such as missing fields and lead profiles with outdated job descriptions.

To help salespeople find the most promising leads, Apollo provides an artificial intelligence prioritization tool. The tool can analyze various data points about potential buyers and estimate the likelihood that they will make a purchase. From there, it priorities those leads to help salespeople target the most promising deal opportunities first.

Apollo’s platform also provides a raft of other capabilities. One feature uses AI to generate sales emails, while another can automatically send those emails to leads at predetermined times. For sales team leaders, it provides tools that can forecast future revenue and analyze representatives’ productivity to find areas for improvement.

The company says its user base includes more than 3 million go-to-market professionals, about a third of whom signed up in 2022. The startup claims that strong demand has helped increase its revenues by a factor of nine over the past two years. 

“Apollo.io is trusted by 40,000 paying customers, from rapidly growing startups to some of the largest global enterprises,” Apollo co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Tim Zheng detailed in a blog post today. “Half of our revenue is generated internationally.” 

Apollo has more than doubled its headcount since the start of the year to about 450 workers. Using its newly closed $100 million round, the company plans to hire another 550 workers by 2025. Apollo will also invest a portion of the capital in adding more AI features to its platform and improving the user experience. 

Image: Apollo