Business contact software company ZoomInfo is being acquired by Vancouver, WA-based marketing technology firm DiscoverOrg in a deal that aims combine the pair’s business and personnel intelligence into a single dataset to power enterprise marketing tools.
Great Hill Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm that bought ZoomInfo in August 2017 for $240 million, declined to disclose how much DiscoverOrg paid for the Waltham, MA-based company or other terms of the deal.
A source close to the deal, however, said DiscoverOrg shelled out more than $500 million—a steep increase from what Great Hill Partners paid for ZoomInfo 18 months ago.
The two companies have a combined 1,050 employees: about 60 percent from DiscoverOrg and 40 percent from ZoomInfo, according to DiscoverOrg founder and CEO Henry Schuck, who will lead the combined company. ZoomInfo CEO Derek Schoettle, who joined the company in July 2018 from IBM’s Watson unit, will advise during the transition.
Together, the businesses will have 15,000 customers and 120,000 active users across the globe, according to a press release.
ZoomInfo, founded in 2000, has developed an extensive database of 100 million business contacts worldwide. DiscoverOrg, founded in 2006, developed databases and company intelligence products that marketing teams can use to track companies. DiscoverOrg’s investors include Boston-based TA Associates, New York-based The Carlyle Group (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CG]]), and New York-based 22C Capital.
Breaking the news to ZoomInfo employees at its new headquarters in Waltham, Schuck said the companies will continue business as usual for the next six to nine months as executives decide how to best stitch the two together. Customers will see the databases “lightly” integrated, Schuck told Xconomy later, then within a year a new B2B platform launched.
“There’s a massive market in front of us,” Schuck said in a phone interview.
“Companies of all sizes—small, really big, mid-market—they’ve spent $100,000, a million dollars on CRM tools like Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua, and sales development tools like Outreach and SalesLoft. In our mind they are containers to hold data,” he added. “They don’t have value in and of themselves. They become valuable when you put high quality data in.”
Last month, ZoomInfo said it had nearly doubled its headcount since July 2018 to its current 450 employees globally.
