Matt Curl

Chief Executive Officer Apollo.io

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Matt Curl became Chief Executive Officer of Apollo.io on 3 February 2026, taking over from co-founder Tim Zheng in a succession both men have described as deliberate rather than forced. It is an operator’s appointment. Curl’s background is not in founding companies or in running sales; it is in the unglamorous machinery underneath — self-serve funnels, business systems, operations, integrating acquired subsidiaries — first at Fivestars, then at Checkr, and then at Apollo itself, where he served as Chief Operating Officer from July 2024 after advising the company since 2019. The year he ran operations before the promotion is the case Apollo made for it: growth accelerated and margins improved at the same time, with the company approaching $200 million in annual recurring revenue and nearly 100,000 paying customers.

Career Highlights

• Chief Executive Officer of Apollo.io since 3 February 2026, succeeding co-founder Tim Zheng, who continues as Chairman of the Board.
• Chief Operating Officer of Apollo.io from July 2024, after advising the company from 2019.
• Led Apollo through a year in which it accelerated growth while improving margins, approaching $200M ARR with nearly 100,000 paying customers and growth of more than 5x since its Series D.
• At Checkr, served as SVP and General Manager; launched Checkr Self Serve, which Apollo says now has more than 100,000 unique customers, and acted in a CEO capacity for Tessera Data, a wholly owned Checkr subsidiary assembled from four separate acquisitions.
• At Fivestars, a Y Combinator-backed startup, was SVP of Operations, building the sales, operations, business systems and product analytics functions from the seed round through to a $317 million acquisition by SumUp.

Professional Journey

Curl’s career has been spent inside the operating layer of venture-backed software companies rather than at the front of them. At Fivestars, a Y Combinator-backed loyalty and customer-marketing company in the Bay Area, he was SVP of Operations and built out four functions — sales, operations, business systems and product analytics — across the whole arc from seed round to exit. The exit was a $317 million acquisition by SumUp, the European payments company, which makes his tenure there a full cycle rather than a stint.

He moved to Checkr, the background-check company, as SVP and General Manager. Checkr was valued at around $5 billion during his time, and his remit there had two distinct halves. One was self-serve: he led and launched Checkr Self Serve, a product Apollo describes as now having over 100,000 unique customers — which is the same problem Apollo itself has, namely converting a large base of individual and small-team users into a business. The other was integration. He served in a CEO capacity for Tessera Data, a wholly owned Checkr subsidiary consolidated out of four separate company acquisitions, which is a specific and fairly rare kind of operating experience: making four bought companies behave as one.

He had been advising Apollo since 2019, according to the company’s February 2026 release, and joined full-time as Chief Operating Officer in July 2024, announced alongside Rich Bessel as SVP of Design. Apollo at that point was moving from being a sales intelligence data provider toward a full go-to-market platform, and the COO brief was explicitly about the operating foundation — execution discipline, margins, systems — rather than about selling.

The promotion followed eighteen months later. Apollo announced on 3 February 2026 that Curl had been appointed Chief Executive Officer with immediate effect, and that Zheng would continue as Chairman. Zheng’s framing was unusually direct for a founder handing over: the transition was deliberate, Curl had been a catalyst for Apollo’s growth and execution, and he was “the best person to lead Apollo forward”. The numbers the company put behind the decision were the year under Curl’s operating leadership — accelerated growth at scale with improving margins, the strongest January, fourth quarter and year-to-date revenue growth the company had recorded, more than 5x growth since the Series D, and a stated approach to $200 million in annual recurring revenue across nearly 100,000 paying customers.

Curl’s own statement set the direction in terms of the product rather than the metrics: Apollo, he said, is building “the system of record and system of action for modern go-to-market”, with a mission to democratise growth by giving every company access to data, intelligence and execution that used to be reserved for the few. He named $500 million in ARR as the next scale target. Apollo was founded in 2015, is headquartered at 415 Mission Street in San Francisco with a further location in New York, and reports between 800 and 900 employees.

Education

No education record was established for this profile. Neither Apollo’s announcement of his appointment as CEO nor its earlier announcement of his appointment as COO names an institution. A Texas A&M University business degree in management information systems circulates on aggregator sites, but it could not be traced to any primary or first-party source and is therefore not asserted here.