“Our reputation in Israel hasn’t caught up with the market since our IPO, but ZoomInfo is now the largest company in Israel by market cap,” said ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck. “Our market cap is over $30B, compared to NICE Systems, Check Point, Monday.com, or SolarEdge, all below $20B. We have our CTO in Israel, and 400 of our 3,000 employees are based here, so I think it’s fair to consider us an Israeli company.”

Three years after the acquisition and more than a year after going public on the Nasdaq in the first IPO of the coronavirus era, the case for viewing ZoomInfo as an Israeli company is strong. The company provides business data and intelligence about people and companies to sales, marketing, and recruiting professionals at more than 20,000 companies worldwide.

The original ZoomInfo was founded in Israel in 2000 as Eliyon Technologies and rebranded as Zoom in 2005. It was acquired in 2017 by US private equity firm Great Hill Partners for $240M, and again in 2019 by Washington-based DiscoverOrg for $800M. Following that deal, the merged company was renamed ZoomInfo.

“Most of our software was developed in Israel, with help from our teams in Boston and elsewhere,” Schuck said. “As DiscoverOrg, we did a lot of things well, but we didn’t build a world-class engineering team. When we acquired ZoomInfo, we got a world-class R&D and innovation team in Ra’anana, 40 people. Now we’ve built a much larger business with ten times as many employees in Israel, and even more if you count our acquisitions here.”

ZoomInfo’s platform provides up-to-date business intelligence on 100 million companies and 150 million individuals, helping marketers and recruiters identify and reach potential prospects as effectively as possible. “We pull signals from a wide variety of premium data sources, so you always have the most current information to work with,” Schuck said.

For recruiting, for example, ZoomInfo can provide a list of everyone working as a director of product marketing in a given region. “We gather that information from company reports, press releases, and other data sources, and our machine learning builds a profile of each candidate,” Schuck explained. “We also built a ‘likely to listen’ score that grades how open a candidate might be to switching companies, based on signals like how long they’ve been in their current role, when they were last promoted, and how often they’ve changed jobs in the past. Then recruiters can send targeted messages across different channels, at varying levels of subtlety, before reaching out directly.”

“This system, like most of ours, was developed in Israel,” Schuck said. “It’s doing detective work on hundreds of millions of people and making tens of millions of updates to the data every month. We’re growing faster than any software company in the market, and with profit margins higher than you typically see in this field.”

ZoomInfo raised almost $1B in its June 2020 IPO, which drew intense scrutiny as one of the first major tech offerings after the pandemic-driven market crash. “We spent all of 2019 preparing to go public on March 23, 2020, right when the world was shutting down,” Schuck said. “We were days away when we decided to pull it. But we kept selling, and the business performed well, growing strongly in April and May. We had some very interesting debates about whether it made sense to be the first tech company to IPO after the crash, and ultimately we decided to do it. We ended up with the largest IPO of the year until Snowflake’s in September, and we ran the entire thing online, virtually.”

After raising $935M that day, the company went on a buying spree. In July, it acquired Chorus.ai, a Tel Aviv-based AI conversation intelligence platform, for $575M in cash. The 40 people in Chorus.ai’s development office were folded into ZoomInfo’s development center.

“The team in Israel is growing 100% year over year, and we’re about to sign a lease on a larger office in Ra’anana so we can continue growing and adding employees over the next five years,” Schuck said. “We’ll see more M&A activity in the software space as we expand internationally. We’re opening a new office in Europe and releasing new products. I can’t say whether we’re planning any acquisitions here specifically, but I will say there’s incredible innovation in Israel, and every time I’m here, I meet a few companies that could be potential targets.”

In the meantime, ZoomInfo’s presence in Israel is firmly established. “Many of our senior leaders are based here, and we’re having a lot of success with our sales and account teams. As a company, we’re strongly committed to Israel.”