Apollo.io is a B2B sales intelligence platform that provides contact data and outreach tools for over 220 million prospects. Founded in 2015 by Tim Zheng, an MIT computer science graduate, Apollo has rapidly grown to over 160,000 customers, including 15,000 paying customers as of early 2022. Its core offering is a database of business contacts crowdsourced from its community of users, giving Apollo an edge in data accuracy and coverage compared to legacy providers.

Zheng's background in edtech plus his team's expertise in data science uniquely position them to build a powerful user-friendly sales platform. Apollo's bottom-up model, starting with a free tier, has cultivated a loyal SMB user base it can expand into. Looking ahead, the company aims to enhance its AI-powered outreach capabilities and move upmarket to serve larger enterprises. A key risk Apollo faces is potential data privacy regulations restricting access to public sources like LinkedIn profiles.

For prospective employees, Apollo offers the opportunity to join a high-growth startup redefining how businesses acquire customers. Its data-driven culture prizes maximizing sales productivity through automation. While competing with larger incumbents like ZoomInfo, Apollo's focus on underserved SMBs provides a sizable market to capture. With strong execution, Apollo could emerge as the leading sales intelligence solution.