Apollo.io Eyes Expansion in India to Tap into Talent, SMB Market Apollo.io secured USD 100 million in a Series D funding in August 2023, led by Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), with additional support from Nexus Venture Partners, Tribe Capital, and Sequoia Capital.

US-based sales engagement platform Apollo.io is eying further expansion in India which is already a core part of the company both in terms of tapping in to the talent pool as well as the small and medium business (SMB) market.

With a valuation of USD 1.6 billion and over 80,000 paying customers, Apollo.io has experienced a 2500 per cent revenue growth since 2021, making it one of the fastest growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies globally.

"At Apollo, our vision is to democratize go-to-market, making it accessible to every business, everywhere. We have seen explosive growth, over 2500 per cent since 2021, because we are filling a critical need. In India, especially, our price advantage makes our end-to-end sales platform a game-changer for small and medium-sized businesses that previously lacked affordable, intelligent sales tools," Dzmitry Markovich, Senior VP of Engineering, Apollo.io told Entrepreneur India.

India is a core talent hub for the company with over 200 of its 700 employees based here, including the vast majority of the engineering team. "We are committed to further expanding our team in India, tapping into the incredible talent pool to drive our mission forward," said Markovich.

Apollo.io secured USD 100 million in a Series D funding in August 2023, led by Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), with additional support from Nexus Venture Partners, Tribe Capital, and Sequoia Capital. This latest investment brings the company's total funding to approximately USD 250 million.

At a time when many companies are calling employees back to the office, Apollo.io believes in a complete remote work model.

"Apollo thrives on remote work, investing heavily in asynchronous communication. Our engineers have location flexibility within India, aiding talent acquisition. 65 per cent of our engineering team is in India with high collaboration enabled using asynchronous communication and AI-based tooling," said Himanshu Gahlot, VP of Engineering, Apollo.io.

In terms of market, India is definitely behind the North American and European region, but it's "substantial", said Gahlot. "A lot of Indian companies know about Apollo because of our data product. Our data product has been very successful which is basically the leads data…we arguably have the best leads data in the market at least for SMBs. Overall, for the SMBs and mid-market plus enterprise, we are head-to-head in competition with ZoomInfo on data, which is the biggest sales platform in the world," he said.

Currently, the split between the US and non-US market is probably close to 50-50 for Apollo. "It's like 50 per cent of our revenue coming from United States, 50 per cent of revenue coming from the outside. So, the non-US market is very important for us and it's a very big opportunity for Apollo's growth in the future," Markovich.

Apollo.io's AI-powered platform provides sales and marketing teams with access to 210 million B2B contacts and 35 million companies worldwide, equipping revenue professionals with the tools to engage high-value leads more efficiently. Apollo counts industry leaders like Stripe, Rippling, DocuSign, and Autodesk among its clients.

"We leverage AI tools like Cursor that help in engineering onboarding and improvement in productivity. On the customer front, we have invested heavily in state-of-the-art LLM-based AI products like automated messaging generation, web-based data enrichment, and AI agents," said Gahlot.