Apollo reaches unicorn status with $1.6B valuation

Project Overview

Apollo, founded in 2015, built a sales prospecting platform full of information on potential leads. To keep growing, it needed the platform to be fast and its pages to work well in search. PressRoom helped Apollo speed up its site and give its searches shareable, SEO-friendly URLs.

Project Execution

PressRoom worked with Apollo in 2018, identifying the projects that would unlock its next phase of growth. Apollo had a large database and an information-dense experience that gave its users a lot of value, and a lot for each page to load.

We ran in-depth technical audits of the site and found performance bottlenecks across the platform. The depth of Apollo's content called for a fast site architecture with several layers of caching, and work on how the browser renders each page. We wrote a detailed technical strategy, held sessions to walk Apollo's engineering team through the proposed changes, and then implemented the new architecture together. The site got more than 40x faster, giving users quick access to the data they need.

Apollo had a second architectural challenge. Its platform had a robust way to search and filter the lead database, but no way to keep that state across reloads or share it with a coworker. The search code was complex, and the team was wary of changing it, so we planned a step-by-step approach to compartmentalize and simplify it. Through a series of careful refactors, we moved the data flow onto shareable, SEO-friendly URLs, opening those searches up to organic search.

Apollo has kept growing since, and raised $100M at a $1.6B valuation in 2023.