US business intelligence company ZoomInfo (Nasdaq: ZI) announced today that it is acquiring Israeli-US startup Chorus.ai for $575 million cash. Chorus.ai has developed a system that analyzes and provides insights on sales conversations and competes with Israeli startup Gong.io, which raised money last month at a company valuation of $7.2 billion, making it the privately-held Israeli startup with the highest valuation.
ZoomInfo CTO and head of Israel development center Nir Keren told "Globes," "We are going to compete with Gong is a very major market. Together with the information that we have, we will speed up development of Chorus.ai's solution so that customers will receive together with the analysis an abundance of information that will help them in the sales process. At ZoomInfo we have 23,000 custmoers and each one of them is a potential customer of Chorus, so it will be difficult for Gong."
Chorus.ai was founded in 2015 by president (and former CEO) Roy Raanani, CTO Russell Levy and Micha Breakstone., who has left the company. The company's CEO today is an American, Jim Benton. Chorus.ai has 200 employees including 40 in its development offices in Tel Aviv, who will become part of ZoomInfo's development center.
Chorus.ai's technology is built on natural language processing and allows the production of insights from conversations conducted by sales staff that will increase the chances of their success. To date, the company has raised $100 million from investors including Gil Dibner, a former senior partner in Israel's Genesis and Gemini Ventures as well as foreign funds Georgian Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Emergence Capital.
ZoomInfo, which provides business information to B2B salespeople, raised $935 million last year in a Nasdaq IPO. Keren says that the current acquisition is part of ZoomInfo's strategy to expand and control a range of business information services. Chorus.ai's platform will be added to ZoomInfo's platform and will offer sales conversation insights to its customers.
ZoomInfo was founded in 2000 in Israel by Yonathan Stern and acquired by US private equity firm Great Hill Partners for $240 million in 2017. In 2019 it merged with Discover.Org for $800 million, whose CEO Henry Schuck today manages ZoomInfo. The company held its IPO last year at a valuation of $8 billion and is today worth $20 billion. ZoomInfo has 330 employees in its Ra'anana development center and is currently opening a Tel Aviv office, which will take in Chorus.ai's Israel team.
Schuck said, "The acquisition of Chorus will accelerate our vision to deliver a modern go-to-market platform that brings together best-in-class intelligence with comprehensive data management, workflow, and engagement software, empowering companies to effectively execute their revenue-generating strategies. With the largest Conversation Intelligence patent portfolio in the industry, Chorus will advance each aspect of our vision by surfacing a new category of insights, illuminating new workflows, and enabling more targeted engagement at scale."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 13, 2021
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