Our Investment in Apollo to Re-imagine Sales Automation
Nexus Venture Partners is delighted to announce leading the $7 million Series-A in Apollo as they continue building their AI-powered most complete turnkey revenue acceleration platform for B2B companies.
We first met with Apollo founders — Roy, Ray, and Tim — in Mar 2016 at Y Combinator where their smarts, clarity of thinking, and humility left a distinct impression on our team. Rarely do we come across a founding team with such complementary skill sets. Their vision for Apollo, then called ZenProspect, to fix the disjointed B2B sales process and help sales teams win, instantly resonated with us. At Nexus, we believe in backing exceptional founders and it was an easy decision to invest in the seed round.
It’s been a real pleasure to work closely with this team over the past two years and watch the organization scale and the product mature from a simple feature to a powerful sales platform. Throughout, we’ve observed four consistent aspects in the ethos of the company that confirmed our initial positive impressions: (a) customer-first thinking; (b) frugality — every penny matters; (c) building what sells; and (d) putting performance before storytelling.
Currently, sales teams are forced to pick and choose from a plethora of sales tech tools, mostly discrete point-solutions, to assemble their sales-stack. It’s time consuming and often results in a convoluted and tedious workflow that requires many handovers, shuttling between browser tabs and the loss of context in transition. Put together, these inefficiencies inhibit collaboration, throttle productivity, and make it a challenge to hit targets.
Apollo’s answer is to put the sales team’s objectives first in a single, unified platform that aligns value directly with the team’s end-goal to make selling faster and easier.
Apollo allows sales reps, sales leaders, and marketing to work together from a single common operating system to set business goals, define territories, prospect and score leads, personalize messaging, automate engagement, manage sales performance, and continuously iterate workflows. It’s a powerful system that makes sure all team members are always on the same page, working towards the same goal.
Apollo also seamlessly integrates with CRM (Salesforce, Hubspot) as well as email clients (Gmail, Outlook, Sendgrid). This allows their AI engine to leverage customer’s first-party data living across CRM, emails, calendars, messages etc. and Apollo’s proprietary datasets (including 200+ million potential prospects across 10 million companies) to offer their customers powerful insights to help better decide who to target and when, how to reach out, and what to say. This data-driven approach helps users maximize performance, making growth predictable and scalable.
We’re excited to partner with Apollo as they help sales teams everywhere meet their full potential.
— Abhishek Sharma and Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Nexus Venture Partners
For more insights from the Nexus team, click here.
