Tim Zheng

Co-Founder and Chairman Apollo.io

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Tim Zheng is co-founder and chairman of the board of Apollo.io, the go-to-market platform he started in 2015 under the name ZenProspect and ran as chief executive for a decade before handing the job to Matt Curl in February 2026. The company he built began as an internal fix: he was an engineer at an education startup whose sales had stalled, could not find a tool that solved the outreach problem, built one, and spun it out. That origin explains a good deal about Apollo’s shape — product-led, self-serve, priced to be started by anyone rather than sold through enterprise contracts — and it carried the business from a Y Combinator batch to approaching $200 million in annual recurring revenue and nearly 100,000 paying customers.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Apollo.io in 2015, as ZenProspect, and led it as chief executive until February 2026.
• Appointed chairman of the board on 3 February 2026, when Matt Curl became CEO; Apollo said he would “remain actively involved as Chairman”.
• Took the company through Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch, where it was the third fastest growing company in the cohort and reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue during the programme.
• Rebranded ZenProspect as Apollo in June 2018 alongside a $7 million Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners, with Social Capital and Y Combinator participating.
• Grew the business past $150 million ARR by May 2025 and to approaching $200 million by early 2026, with more than 5x growth since the 2023 Series D.
• Previously founded an education technology startup, where the outreach problem that led to Apollo first appeared.

Professional Journey

Zheng describes his own start plainly: an engineer with a taste for product-led solutions, whose journey began at an education startup. It was there, he writes, that “the need for effective outreach led me to build a new go-to-market platform”. The TechCrunch account of the founding fills in the mechanics — sales at that company had flatlined, no existing tool solved it, and the internal tool his team built grew from 5,000 to 150,000 users in five weeks. He took the tool out as a company of its own.

That company launched in 2015 as ZenProspect, with Ray Li, now Apollo’s chief technology officer, as a fellow founder. It entered Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch and was the third fastest growing company in it, reaching $1 million in annual recurring revenue while still in the programme. In June 2018 Zheng rebranded it as Apollo and announced a $7 million Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners, with Social Capital and Y Combinator participating; at that point the business had 500 customers and 50 employees.

The decade that followed is legible in the milestone timeline Apollo publishes itself: a free plan in 2018, a freemium experience in 2019, unlimited data plans in 2020, the first 5,000 paying users in January 2021 and the first 10,000 by October, a Series B that November, a Series C in March 2022, 40,000 paying users and a Series D in August 2023, and $150 million in ARR by May 2025. It is the arc of a product-led business compounding rather than a sales-led one landing contracts, which is what Zheng set out to build.

On 3 February 2026 he stepped back from running it. Apollo announced that Matt Curl — who had advised the business from 2019 and then joined full-time as chief operating officer, partnering with Zheng for close to six years — was chief executive with immediate effect, and that Zheng would continue as chairman of the board. Zheng framed it as planned rather than forced: “This transition is deliberate, and one I feel extremely confident about… Matt is the best person to lead Apollo forward.” At the handover the company was approaching $200 million in annual recurring revenue with nearly 100,000 paying customers, had grown more than fivefold since its Series D, and had just posted its strongest January, fourth quarter and year-to-date revenue growth.

He remains chairman, and Apollo said he would stay actively involved supporting Curl and the leadership team through the transition. The company has continued to move since — acquiring Pocus, launching an app in ChatGPT, adding a chief financial officer and a chief product officer — under the chief executive he chose.

Education

No education record could be established. Apollo publishes no biography stating where he studied, and the claims circulating in secondary sources contradict each other — one gives a mathematics degree from MIT, another a computer science degree from Stanford. Neither is supported by a first-party source, so neither is recorded here.