Biggest tech IPO of the year: ZoomInfo's data-crawling biz valued at $13.4B
When you have the same name as a famous person... restaurant reservations come easier. ZoomInfo (not Zoom) is a subscription-based data service that companies buy for their sales teams. ZoomInfo's AI-powered database "crawls" the interwebs to retrieve the juicy deets that employees need to stalk their prey. And it takes a no-BS approach: the slogan is basically "Hit Your Sales Number."
- Biggest tech IPO of the year: ZoomInfo shares soared over 60% in its Nasdaq debut yesterday — it's also the 1st tech IPO of the corona-conomy.
Business reach relies on customer reach... And customer reach relies on the quantity and quality of info you have on your customers. ZoomInfo — which was formed out of DiscoverOrg — is trying to provide that:
- 15K customers use ZoomInfo's data fetching service to build out and reach their sales network — that automates things like building out org charts and collecting emails/digits of potential leads.
- Tech giants like Salesforce, Oracle, and Microsoft have integrated ZoomInfo with their own sales tools. Fun fact: 90% of the Zoom Video sales team ironically uses the ZoomInfo platform to prospect (#meta).
ZoomInfo is the dairy farmer... But it doesn’t control the milk (aka, the data). It highlighted a key risk in its IPO filing: “We rely heavily on internet search engines.” ZoomInfo's core subscription product depends on Google to reel in its customer-stalking info — but search engine algorithms can change, putting it at risk of losing its sales milk.