The San Francisco B2B sales platform, which recently approached $200 million in ARR and named a new CEO, is embracing the revenue intelligence startup’s signal layer technology to deepen its enterprise push.
Apollo.io has acquired Pocusa revenue intelligence startup that helps sales teams identify and prioritize accounts most likely to buy based on behavioral and CRM signals. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The deal is the clearest signal yet of Apollo’s ambitions beyond the mid-market, and combines Pocus’ intelligence layer with reach and data infrastructure to drive deeper enterprise sales workflows.
Apollo was founded in 2015 and has become one of the most widely used B2B sales platforms on the market by combining a database of over 230 million contacts with outreach, internal dialing, conversation intelligence and deal management tools.
The company does close to $200 million in annual recurring revenue and serves more than 600,000 companies globally, according to its own figures. In February, the company named Matt Curl as CEO, replacing co-founder Tim Zheng, who moved to chairman. Curl was COO and has been advising the company since 2019. The CEO transition was clearly intended at the time as preparation for the takeover phase, and the Pocus deal is the first visible result.
Pocus was founded in 2021 by CEO Alexa Grabell, co-founder and CTO Isaac Pohl-Zaretsky. The company grew out of a problem Grabell experienced firsthand as a sales operations leader at Dataminr: revenue teams had data across CRM systems, product usage records, and marketing platforms, but no good way to translate that fragmentation into actionable priorities for the sales team.
Pocus built a platform that combines these signals, CRM activity, customer behavior and intent data, uncovering accounts with the strongest buying performance and delivering recommended actions to sales reps. Its clients include Asana, Canva and Monday.com. These companies are uniquely positioned among product-driven growth companies, where understanding how users engage with the product is directly related to sales and expansion.
The company raised about $23 million Series A in June 2022, led by Coatue, with participation from First Round Capital, Box Group, GTM Fund and Mantis VC (Chinsmokers’ investment vehicle). Total funding for seed and Series A rounds has reached tens of millions of dollars, although the numbers vary across databases.
“We started Pocus to solve a simple but critical problem: revenue teams were drowning in data but starving for direction.” Alexa Grabell said in the announcement.
“Apollo built the execution layer that modern GTM teams rely on. By joining Apollo, we can expand our mission to provide signal-driven clarity and help teams focus on the opportunities that matter most.
In the procurement platform for Apollo, the company fills a gap that is becoming increasingly apparent as it moves up the ladder. Apollo’s strength lies in the on-going execution: finding the right contacts, sequencing, making calls and logging activity. Where it’s weaker is the intelligence layer on top of that execution that determines which accounts deserve attention in the first place and why now.
Pocus adds exactly that: a signal processing layer that can prioritize accounts based on real-time behavioral evidence rather than static firm data. The company says enterprise accounts have grown more than 400% in the past 12 months, with Anthropic and Glean among notable new names.
Matt Curl saw the acquisition as an acceleration of Apollo’s broader platform thesis. “By combining the talent and technology of Pocus with the scale of Apollo, we strengthen our position today and open new opportunities as we continue to expand the upmarket.” he said.
As a step toward what the company calls an “AI-native GTM operating system,” the company deploys a single platform that encompasses data, signal detection, prioritization, and execution as an alternative to the point solutions that most enterprise sales teams currently integrate.
Apollo says AI adoption among its customers has increased from 35% to 75% since the launch of the AI assistant, and weekly active users of the product have increased 94% since general availability.
The deal is also a product market exit for a well-regarded startup. Accessing a platform with Apollo’s distribution and data depth makes Pocus’ technology more valuable than it could be as a stand-alone business.
