Matt
Curl

The Operator Who Ran It Before It Was His Job

When Apollo.io announced in February 2026 that Matt Curl was its new CEO, founder Tim Zheng offered an explanation that doubled as a confession: "Matt has effectively been the de facto CEO for the past year. Now the title matches the reality." In the world of founder transitions, that's about as clean as it gets - no drama, no search committee, no outside candidate flown in. Just a title catching up with the work already done.

Curl had been at Apollo as COO since July 2024, but his relationship with the company stretches back to at least 2019, when he began advising it. Nearly six years of watching, advising, then running - before the nameplate changed. Few executives earn the top job by making the previous title irrelevant. Curl did exactly that.

Apollo.io is not a small stage. The San Francisco-based platform is the go-to-market layer for companies hunting leads, enriching CRM data, running multichannel outreach, and scoring prospects with AI. With $253M in total funding and approaching $200M in ARR from nearly 100,000 paying customers, it sits at the intersection of two of enterprise software's most active spending categories: sales intelligence and AI-powered automation. Curl inherited it in the middle of its fastest growth run yet.

Built in Texas, Scaled in San Francisco

Curl studied Management Information Systems at Texas A&M University - a degree that sits at the intersection of business logic and technical systems, which turns out to be a precise description of how he has built his career. He is not a founder-type who built a product from a dorm room. He is the person who shows up after the product exists and figures out how to sell it, scale it, and run it without breaking it.

His first proving ground was Fivestars, a Y Combinator-backed loyalty platform. He joined for a three-month interim stint. He stayed nearly four years. In that stretch he built the sales organization from 20 people to 225, constructed the RevOps function largely from scratch, and stayed through a $317 million acquisition by SumUp. The "interim" framing never quite applied.

From there, Checkr - a $5 billion consumer reporting agency. As SVP and General Manager, Curl built the business case for and launched "Checkr Self Serve," which grew to over 100,000 unique customers. He also ran Tessera Data, a Checkr subsidiary assembled from four separate acquisitions, effectively operating as its CEO. The pattern was becoming clear: Curl gets handed problems that sit between product, operations, and revenue, and turns them into scalable things.

What a COO Does When No One's Watching

Apollo's announcement that Curl was joining as its first-ever COO in 2024 came with Tim Zheng's endorsement: "Matt's expertise in driving revenue growth will help us scale operations." That's corporate for: we finally have someone who will handle everything we've been too busy building to systematize.

What followed was, by any measure, a remarkable year. Apollo delivered its best month, best Q4, and best fiscal year on record. The company accelerated its growth rate even as revenue scaled. Margins improved. Capital efficiency strengthened. Growth reached 5x since the Series D. These are not the numbers of a business coasting - they are the numbers of a machine that had its settings tuned.

Curl's operating philosophy leans on instrumentation - he talks about "designing, implementing, monitoring, and consistently improving" processes with the same fluency others use to discuss product roadmaps. In a SalesTechStar interview, he was blunt: "On the process side, there is no technology substitute better than a strong operations team." For someone now leading an AI-native platform, that's a notable frame. He doesn't believe the software replaces the people who run it. He believes it makes them sharper.

The CEO's AI Thesis

Curl's clearest statement of direction came in how he described Apollo's AI ambitions upon taking the CEO role. A lot of enterprise AI in 2026 is essentially a recommendation engine - here's a suggested email, here's a ranked list of leads, here's your next best action. Curl is not interested in that version of the product.

"Where I am pushing is in making AI practical, not performative," he said in February 2026. "AI should not simply recommend, it should take action, and Apollo does both." It's a meaningful distinction. For Apollo's target customers - revenue teams at mid-market and enterprise companies - the bottleneck is not information. They have plenty of leads, plenty of signals, plenty of data. The bottleneck is execution: sending the right message at the right time, enriching the right records, following up before a deal goes cold. Apollo's proposition under Curl is that the platform handles the execution, not just the analysis.

The target he has articulated publicly is $500M in ARR. Starting from $200M, that's 2.5x growth on a base that already took years to build. It's ambitious but not fantastical - the market for B2B sales software is expanding, AI spending is accelerating, and Apollo's combination of data breadth and workflow automation gives it a durable position. Curl's job is to execute the scale-up without breaking the model that generated the momentum.

On Running Operations: Five Things He Gets Wrong About the COO Role

In public commentary, Curl has pushed back on several misconceptions about what a COO actually does - observations that reveal as much about him as about the role. He rejects the idea that COOs are removed from frontline operations. He distinguishes between inspecting work and expressing dissatisfaction with the people doing it. He insists the role changes substantially from company to company. He emphasizes that technology fluency is non-negotiable. And he pushes back on the idea that COO is purely an execution function rather than a strategic one.

The picture is of an executive who thinks carefully about leverage - about which interventions compound and which just add noise. That instinct translates directly to how he approaches AI: don't build something that requires constant human re-review. Build something that earns trust through accuracy, then automates the action.

The $317M Thread

A detail worth noting: Curl's first major company-building chapter ended with a $317 million acquisition. He was part of the team that built Fivestars from a scrappy YC startup to a SumUp portfolio asset. That experience - running operations through an acquisition, learning what investors look for at exit - is not typical COO training. It shapes how you think about building things that are worth owning.

At Checkr, the Tessera Data chapter added a second layer: M&A integration. Running a subsidiary assembled from four acquisitions requires a specific kind of patience - getting systems to talk to each other, aligning cultures that didn't choose each other, making a portfolio feel like a product. Curl did that at Tessera before it was part of his Apollo job description.

What's Next for Apollo.io

Apollo's platform spans contact discovery, data enrichment, email outreach, sequence automation, call intelligence, CRM synchronization, and AI-powered lead scoring. Under Curl's leadership, the company announced the "Apollo Next" product generation in mid-2025 - a new suite emphasizing AI agents and autonomous workflow execution. The messaging aligns precisely with Curl's stated thesis: less dashboarding, more doing.

The broader competitive context is fierce. Outreach, Salesloft, Clay, ZoomInfo, and a dozen AI-native newcomers are all competing for the same GTM budget. Apollo's edge is the combination of its live data network (one of the largest B2B contact databases), its activation tools, and an increasingly agentic AI layer. Curl's job is to make that combination feel inevitable to the revenue teams considering it.

He has one more structural advantage that doesn't appear on any slide deck: Tim Zheng, now Chairman, has known Curl since around 2016. The transition was not a break - it was a handoff between people who have been building the same thing for years, just with different titles. That continuity matters in a market that moves fast and punishes disruption to momentum.

Apollo.io under Curl is not being reinvented. It is being run. Which, for a company at this stage, is exactly what the job requires.