INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
ZenProspect, a startup that emerged from the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class to help companies use data and intelligence to increase sales,
announced today that it was rebranding as Apollo
It also announced a $7 million Series A investment.The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners
Social Capital and Y Combinator also participated
Apparently Y Combinator liked what they saw enough to continue to invest in the company.Apollo helps customers connect their sales people
with the right person at the right time
That is typically a customer that is most likely to buy the product. It does this by combining a number of tools including a rules engine
to automate prospect routing, a lead scoring tool and analytics to measure results at a granular level, among others.The company also uses
data they have collected from 200 million contacts at 10 million companies to match sellers to buyers along with the information in the
user’s own CRM tools — typically Salesforce
Apollo is making this vast database of company and contact data available for customers to use themselves for free starting today.Apollo CEO
and founder Tim Zheng says the company was born out of a need at a previous venture
He was working at a startup that was floundering and sales had flatlined
When they couldn’t find a product on the market to help them, they decided to build it and saw the number of users increase from 5000 to
150,000 users in just five weeks
That eventually reached a million users. As he spoke to friends at other Bay area companies about what his company had done, he heard a
lot of interest, and decided to turn that sales tool into a company.
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The company launched as
ZenProspect in 2015 and went through Y Combinator in 2016
They were the third fastest growing company in that YC batch, generating $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) during their
tenure. In fact, they were profitable out of the gate, using their own software to sell the product.Zheng points out that there are
thousands of sales tools out there, but he said, even if you bought every one of them and stitched them together you still wouldn’t have a
Zheng says his company has figured out how to solve that problem and provide that structure to deliver the best prospects to sales people to
close deals.The company works closely with Salesforce as 80 percent of its customers are using data inside of Salesforce in conjunction with
It’s worth noting, however, that Apollo is not built on top of Salesforce platform
It just integrates with it.They target both early stage startups looking to increase sales and established enterprise customers with huge
Today, Apollo has 500 customers and 50 employees
With the current influx of money, they expect to get to 120 in the next 12 -18 months.
