Histoire de client
Apollo users drive 46% more booked meetings with Perplexity’s API
Perplexity Sonar API
Métriques
46% increase in meetings booked
2.5X lower latency than comparative solutions
5.6M enrichments executed monthly using Perplexity Sonar API
“Apollo uses Perplexity’s API to power AI research for our users, which increases outbound performance and drives revenue. Perplexity has been a massive unlock because it helps our users target prospects showing buying signals with more precision and craft highly relevant and personalized messaging at scale. We wanted to integrate an AI search engine that drives outcomes for sales reps — Perplexity does that for us.”
Tyler Phillips, Director of Product Management, Apollo
Apollo is an end-to-end AI sales platform trusted by over 500,000 businesses across the globe. Backed by prominent investors including Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Tribe Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners, Apollo has raised approximately $250 million in funding since its inception, and has been featured on Forbes, TechCrunch, and Deloitte’s Fast 500 list.
La tâche
Implementing automated prospect research to support a growing user base of sales reps
As a core differentiator of its platform, Apollo provides a searchable B2B database of over 210+ million contacts and 35+ million companies for its user base of sales reps and GTM teams. However, to better personalize outreach across leads, reps constantly found themselves digging for additional context, including company updates, executive priorities, and shifting market trends. Just to find the right leads to reach out to and write relevant emails, sales reps were bouncing between LinkedIn profiles, company websites, press releases, and generic search results — a fragmented, slow, and unscalable outbound workflow.
Tyler Phillips, Apollo’s Director of Product Management, recognized this gap and proposed bringing AI deep research directly into the platform — eliminating context switching while unlocking scalable outbound workflows. As he puts it, “You should be able to take 1,000 accounts, run research on all of them, and see which are showing signals of fit for your product.” To make his vision a reality, Tyler looked externally — prioritizing speed to market and avoiding unnecessary lift on Apollo’s AI team. What he needed was a ready-to-integrate solution that was:
Accurate
In B2B sales, where every outreach relies on high-level research, there's no room for flawed or outdated information. After testing several solutions with competing frontier models that surfaced vague or unverified claims, Tyler knew he needed an AI partner that could deliver source-backed insights on demand.
Performant
For time-strapped sales reps, every second counts when working through an extensive list of leads. If research lags, sales reps lose their rhythm and move on. Tyler needed a solution that felt immediate — fast enough to supercharge outbound workflows and responsive enough to support real-time decision-making.
Scalable
Apollo's platform supports an entire ecosystem of sales reps and processes millions of records each month. Tyler's ideal solution had to support that level of scale without forcing tradeoffs between cost and quality. A research solution that buckled under load — or got prohibitively expensive as usage scaled — would be a non-starter.
La Solution
Empowering sales reps with cited, real-time insights in one unified platform
Perplexity's API proved to be exactly what Tyler needed to enable AI deep research within Apollo's platform, without committing to a time- and resource-intensive in-house build. The Apollo team used Perplexity's API to power what became Apollo AI Research — a research layer that pulls insights from both Apollo internal data sources and external sources across the public web.
With Apollo AI Research, sales reps now move from lead identification to personalized outreach in one flow — no context switching, no missed signals. “Research has quickly become our most important use case,” Tyler says. “It was critical to have high-quality outputs — and Perplexity helps us maintain that standard.”
Accelerating outreach with verifiable research
Sales reps move quickly— and so does Apollo AI Research. By delivering comprehensive and cited insights pulled from internal and external sources in seconds, the Perplexity-powered research layer empowers sales reps to accelerate their outbound workflows with confidence. In Tyler's words, "Perplexity's API has been instrumental in helping our users surface information that doesn’t exist in Apollo’s internal datasets, like a recently released 10-K or comments made by a CEO during a podcast."
Refining accuracy through edge-case collaboration
Close collaboration with Perplexity ensures answer accuracy remains strong — even as queries get more complex. When sales reps encounter edge cases, Apollo flags them in real time, then works directly with Perplexity via Slack to refine the system. “The team takes our feedback seriously,” Tyler says. "As a result, sales reps get more reliable answers on nuanced queries, boosting trust in the system and reducing time spent second-guessing outputs."
Le Résultat
Apollo AI Research helps sales reps capitalize on every opportunity
With Apollo AI Research delivering source-backed insights on demand, sales reps move faster, dig deeper, and act on more qualified opportunities. Rather than manually compiling insights across thousands of leads, Apollo users now execute complex queries and surface relevant findings across all opportunities in seconds.
Mere months after the integration, Apollo AI Research has already driven a 46% increase in meetings booked across its users. On the operations side, Apollo executes 5.6 million enrichments monthly through Perplexity Sonar — ensuring the platform's vast database of B2B contacts remains a potent source of lead identification.
“There’s a lot of skepticism around AI in sales right now — people assume it’s just going to churn out spam,” Tyler says. “But with Perplexity powering Apollo’s research, we’ve shown that AI can actually raise the bar. Our users are generating outreach that’s personalized, helpful, and trusted — and that’s exactly the kind of experience we want to deliver at scale.”
*Sonar Chat Completions is now Agent API with more models, tools, and research-backed presents. Get started with our docs here.