Cloud Stocks: Analysis of ZoomInfo’s Everstring Acquisition

Go-To-Market intelligence provider ZoomInfo (Nasdaq: ZI) had listed earlier this year. Despite the current global conditions, the organization has been investing in acquisitions of other smaller companies to add AI and Machine Learning capabilities to its portfolio.

ZoomInfo’s Financials

Recently, ZoomInfo announced its third quarter results. Revenues grew 56% to $123.4 million, surpassing the market’s forecast of $116.87 million. EPS was $0.11, again beating analysts’ estimate of $0.09.

Among key metrics, ZoomInfo now has more than 720 customers and $100,000 or greater in annual contract value.

For the fourth quarter, ZoomInfo expects revenues of $129-$131 million, compared with the market’s expectations at $130.3 million. EPS is forecast to be $0.09-$0.10, compared with market expectations at $0.10 a share. ZoomInfo expects revenues of $465-$467 million for the year, with EPS of $0.31-$0.32, compared with previous expectations of $451-$455 million and an EPS of $0.20-$0.30. The market was looking for revenues of $468.35 million for the year with an EPS of $0.32.

ZoomInfo’s Product Upgrades

During the quarter, ZoomInfo launched several new features for its core products that helped provide greater speed, scalability, transparency, security, and administrative control to its enterprise customers. It embedded business intelligence dashboards directly into its platform, allowing users to track real-time changes. Its APIs and enrichment solutions now help customers’ CRM and Marketing Automation platforms, providing detailed usage analytics and giving administrators clear views of platform engagement. The added capability will help communicate the ongoing value and ROI given by ZoomInfo.

It also enhanced the mobile experience by adding new features such as Quick Search, redesign of its contact profile alerts, and a new real-time intelligence feed to give its users a place to consume proprietary and actionable content on target prospects and customers.

It recently released Engage, a sales engagement offering meant to help sales teams maximize productivity through access to automated sales dialers and built-in email integration to manage sales workflows. Engage will allow users to get clear steps to activate data and engage with prospects and customers. The addition of this sales enablement market is estimated to increase its total addressable market opportunity by more than $5 billion to over $30 billion.

ZoomInfo’s Everstring Acquisition

During the quarter, ZoomInfo has been on an acquisition spree. It recently announced the acquisition of EverString, another AI-powered business-to-business company data-as-a-service provider with industry-leading data coverage of small- and medium-sized businesses. EverString’s proprietary technology goes through both online and offline sources and catalogs company and contact data about businesses. Unlike other data vendors that rely on offline surveying and phone banks to keep data updated, EverString relies on machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing technologies to maintain this data. Its tools give it the ability to track data on very small businesses as well.

ZoomInfo will leverage the acquisition to enhance its comprehensive go-to-market platform. EverString’s 100 million company records and 70 million professional profiles will be integrated into ZoomInfo’s dynamic data asset of over 15 million company records and 130 million professional profiles. EverString will also contribute more than 120 million business locations and over 1 million linkages between corporate entity relationships that help in identifying potential buying centers in organizations.

San Mateo-based EverString was set up in 2012 and had raised $78.7 million in funding from investors including IDG Capital Logo, Lakestar, Chiratae Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DHVC, Microsoft Accelerator, and ZhenFund.

I had met with Vincent Yang, the co-founder and CEO of EverString back in 2015. He spoke at length about the idea behind the company. The thought of EverString came to him as he wanted to develop a machine that read every single company information about their news, website, and patterns and tells the human which company is interesting enough to invest. The founders did some internal prototyping to see how it worked, and the result was EverString. EverString was developed to do machine learning not only on numerical data, but also on text-based unstructured data. It developed its ML capabilities and even filed a patent for the same.

Back then, EverString had four or five dozen companies and was charging between $30,000-$100,000 each. EverString has surely come a long way since.

Another recent acquisition was that of Clickagy, a leading provider of AI-powered buyer intent data for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition will allow ZoomInfo to integrate Clickagy’s behavioral intent data from over 300,000 publishing domains into its own platform. It will be able to provide sales and marketing professionals with access to processed insights into their customers’ buying behavior and intent signals. As part of the deal, ZoomInfo launched Streaming Intent, a solution that identifies companies with above-average search volume on business-to-business (B2B) topics within minutes of their web activity. Atlanta-based Clickagy was founded in 2012 by Harry Maugans. Prior to the acquisition, it was privately held.

Meanwhile ZoomInfo’s stock is trading at $43.4 with a market capitalization of $16.9 billion. It was trading at a 52-week low of $30.83 in September of this year. ZoomInfo went public in June when it raised $935 million at a valuation of $8.2 billion. It had priced its stock at $21 apiece. Soon after listing, the stock had soared to a high of $64.40.

ZoomInfo was originally set up as DiscoverOrg in 2007 by Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown, whom I had interviewed in 2012. DiscoverOrg had bootstrapped its way to success prior to raising private equity and debt funding. I did another interview with Henry in 2017 when they had just raised private equity financing. In 2019, DiscoverOrg acquired Zoom Information and the entire organization was rebranded as ZoomInfo. Prior to the acquisition, Zoom Information had raised a modest $7 million in funding.

This segment is a part in the series : Cloud Stocks