ZenProspect, a start-up from the 2016 Y Combinator Winter Class designed to help businesses use data and intelligence to increase sales, announced today that it was renamed Apollo. He also announced a $ 7 million Series A investment.
The tour was led by Nexus Venture Partners. Social Capital and Y Combinator also participated. Apparently, Y Combinator liked what they saw enough to continue investing in the business.
Apollo helps customers connect their salespeople to the right person at the right time. This is usually a customer who is most likely to buy the product. It does this by combining a number of tools, including a rules engine to automate lead routing, a scoring tool, and analytics to measure results at a granular level, among others.
The company also uses data collected from 200 million contacts from 10 million businesses to associate sellers with buyers, as well as information contained in the user's CRM tools, typically Salesforce . Apollo puts this extensive database of contact and business data available to customers for free use today.
The CEO and founder of Apollo, Tim Zheng, explains that the company was born of a need in a previous company. He was working in a start-up that was wading and whose sales were flat. When they could not find a product on the market to help them, they decided to build it and saw the number of users increase from 5,000 to 150,000 users in just five weeks. This eventually reached one million users. When he talked to friends from other Bay Area companies about what his company had done, he heard a lot of interest and decided to turn this sales tool into a corporation. .
The company was launched as ZenProspect in 2015 and went through Y Combinator in 2016. They were the third fastest growing company in this YC lot, generating $ 1 million in annual recurring revenue during their tenure . In fact, they were profitable through their own software to sell the product.
Zheng points out that there are thousands of sales tools, but he said that even if you buy them all and you assemble them, you still would not have a good process of sale. Zheng says his company has found how to solve this problem and provide this structure to offer the best prospects for sellers to close deals.
The company works closely with Salesforce, with 80% of its customers using data in Salesforce in conjunction with the Apollo tool. It should be noted, however, that Apollo is not built on the Salesforce platform. He simply integrates with him.
They target both startup startups looking to increase sales and established business clients with huge sales teams. Until now, it worked. Today, Apollo has 500 customers and 50 employees. With the current influx of money, they expect to reach 120 over the next 12 to 18 months.