With over US$900 million in financing (approximately RMB6.3 billion), the first day of the IPO rose as high as 100%...
It has been a long time since the US capital market has seen such an exciting sight.
It was a SaaS company named ZoomInfo that created all of this. Its core business is to use machine learning and other technologies to organize and verify data to help sales staff find suitable targets to achieve marketing intelligence.
Its listing prospectus disclosed that it has served more than 15,000 corporate customers, and Zoom, another conference software supplier, is also one of its customers.
In 2019, ZoomInfo's revenue reached 293 million US dollars, equivalent to about 2.1 billion yuan.
The value given by the capital market is $13 billion, equivalent to RMB 92.5 billion, which is more than 44 times its 2019 revenue.
So, what is the origin of this company? How does it work? Why can it be favored by the market? And, is it worth learning from other players?
Today, let's dig up ZoomInfo, a company that has been criticized by many media as "boosting US stock IPO" and "making US stock IPO rejuvenate".
Being sold twice in less than 3 years, ZoomInfo's market value doubled 54 times
ZoomInfo was founded in 2000, just when the SaaS boom just started in Silicon Valley.
Salesforce, a SaaS company with a valuation of over 100 billion US dollars, is only a year old, and its founder Marc Benioff also held a "No Software" protest in Silicon Valley.
Unlike most SaaS companies that want to replace old software, ZoomInfo is positioned as a company that provides sales and market intelligence. The initial business model was to sell access to the information database to business people in need, such as HR, headhunting, and sales. and many more.
Although ZoomInfo was established very early, compared with many SaaS software peers, it didn't usher in a real fast development lane until 2017.
In the next 3 years, it has undergone two changes of reborn.
In August 2017, ZoomInfo, which was founded 17 years ago, also ushered in a moment of self-sale-was acquired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners for $240 million in cash.
Afterwards, the development speed of ZoomInfo has obviously accelerated a lot.
In September 2018, it acquired Datanyze, a provider of technical graphics data and platform, and Y Labs in Israel to improve the construction of data centers.
In February 2019, Great Hill Partners sold ZoomInfo to another B2B company, DiscoverOrg (founded in 2007), for more than US$500 million.
Immediately afterwards, DiscoverOrg was renamed to ZoomInfo, which is ZoomInfo, a company with a market value of up to $13 billion.
From the first sale in 2017, the value doubled 54 times.
So, what kind of ZoomInfo is the current ZoomInfo? Why is it worth so much money?
From crawling data to selling intelligence, ZoomInfo's way to make money
For ZoomInfo, its core asset is the information database. In the early days, it mainly used a special crawler software to obtain data from the network to complete the database.
According to the prospectus, it has information on 14 million companies and 120 million people.
There are two main sources of information in the database, one is through crawlers, they monitor 45 million Internet domain names. On the other hand, they will also record the information and data of customers using the platform, and improve the database through feedback.
The database constructed from this constitutes one of ZoomInfo's cash cows, which can provide company and contact information to the outside world, and on this basis, provide integration, identity resolution, email verification, and alarm functions.
In addition, they also conducted in-depth analysis of the data and provided market intelligence clues to external sales, such as the procurement needs and financing needs of some companies, to collect corresponding fees.
Therefore, they also recruited a large number of employees related to data analysis to support the operation of the business.
The prospectus disclosed that the data analysis team of ZoomInfo is composed of 300 research analysts and 40 data scientists, which account for more than 30% of its total employees.
The business model is the same as most SaaS software. ZoomInfo adopts a free value-added model. A total of 4 versions have been released: from elite version, advanced version, professional version to community version, the functions change from more to less.
In 2019, 99% of the $293 million in revenue obtained by ZoomInfo was obtained through subscriptions. And this is also a business with a very high gross profit margin-its gross profit margin in 2019 is 76.6%.
In ZoomInfo's view, this is an industry full of development prospects.
ZoomInfo, a case of marketing intelligence
According to data from Capital IQ, the total expenditures of the world's 2000 largest listed companies on sales and marketing activities alone exceeded US$ 2 trillion in 2018.
Focusing on the ZoomInfo track, ZoomInfo believes that the target market size is $24 billion.
Currently, they use the ZoomInfo platform and have locked in more than 740,000 potential customers worldwide. This means that ZoomInfo now has 15,000 customers with a penetration rate of only 2%.
This is an excellent development opportunity for ZoomInfo, but it is also true for other players in the market.
So, how to get a slice of it?
Although it is difficult to imitate the 20-year-old ZoomInfo, from its development process and current development strategy, it can also summarize the experience of "coming people" that can be used for reference.
For ZoomInfo, the period in which the valuation has changed the most is also a period in which it is constantly enriching its capabilities based on databases and technologies. Of course, it is also a period in which it is constantly intelligent.
This is also the focus of ZoomInfo in the prospectus-the data engine driven by machine learning is constantly digging out new insights and intelligence that customers can adopt from the data.
How to do it intelligently, the story of ZoomInfo is not outstanding:
It has a large amount of data, continuous investment in technology, combined with professionals, to work together to create its own data engine.
What is more critical is how to sort out various unstructured data into machine-able "food" and generate value.
So, what is the core of intelligence?
A group of good technical experts? Suggested some good models? Found a suitable landing scene? Have you figured out Know-How in the scene?
These are important, but in the case of ZoomInfo, the more important thing is the data, and the hard work around the data.
In this process, ZoomInfo itself did 20 years, acquired ZoomInfo, and became the new ZoomInfo DiscoverOrg for 13 years.
Who is ZoomInfo in China?
Now that the capital market is so valued and given such a high valuation, the data of ZoomInfo and the intelligent value behind it are clearly recognized.
Overall, there does not seem to be a company that directly targets ZoomInfo in China.
But from data to data analysis capabilities, Chinese companies are not lacking, but they are not concentrated in the hands of one company.
For example, the data terminal, Maimai and various recruitment companies, such as Lagou and Boss direct recruitment, etc., have a lot of information about the company and employees. However, the data they possess has not been more directly transformed into intelligence and services to the B side like ZoomInfo.
And in the future planning, ZoomInfo also put recruitment on the agenda.
The technical side is not difficult. Companies that force intelligence to acquire customers, such as Bailian Intelligence, are doing similar things. They want to use text analysis to help sales find leads, but the richness of data and technical capabilities are still certain. gap.
In May 2019, UiPath completed a $568 million Series D round of financing with a valuation of $7 billion, which directly set off a wave of RPA+AI in China. Who will be the next?
