Last month, Apollo announced its acquisition of Pocus.
Founded in 2021, Pocus was one of the first Product-Led Growth (PLG) platforms —and one of the last standing.
Its initial value proposition was to aggregate product signals and apply AI to score and trigger actions that drive playbooks. These workflows spanned the full lifecycle of product-qualified leads (PQLs), driving adoption and usage, monetization, and timely sales-led engagement. The company has since expanded its focus to a broader set of sales motions. It brings best-in-class capabilities to Apollo to unify signals and prioritize next-best actions, supporting its move upmarket.
The acquisition prompted a look back at the fate of the once red-hot PLG-CRM category.
Fueled by COVID, product-led growth became the buzz in 2022. Software managing PQLs emerged as a category investors believed would become a durable segment of the sales stack. Today, most of these players have wound down or shut down. Brendan Short mapped what became of each one. The few that pivoted found exits through acquisition: Endgame by HighTouch, Madkudu by HG Insights, and now Pocus by Apollo.
What happened to PLG-CRM echoes the 2018 absorption of predictive analytics into the broader stack: vendors were challenged to scale, and the category dissolved the same way. Mike Cabot’s earlier article offers insight into what happened at the time.
Over the years, I’ve watched pure analytics applications struggle when not connected to specific actions, both measurable and high-impact. The pattern has been consistent enough to shape a conviction: predictive and scoring models need to be part of a broader, action-oriented system to reach their full potential.
What’s clear today is that scoring has never mattered more, and the market is catching up to that reality. As data sources and signals multiply, the ability to make sense of them and surface the right next-best action is becoming a critical piece of the modern revenue stack. That makes predictive models the cornerstone of any logic that triggers signal-based plays or recommends next-best actions. That’s why scoring is hot again.