ZoomInfo Technologies Inc

ZoomInfo, formerly known as DiscoverOrg, was co-founded in 2007 by our chief executive officer (“CEO”), Henry Schuck. DiscoverOrg achieved significant organic growth since its founding and acquired Zoom Information, Inc. (“Pre-Acquisition ZI”) in February 2019 to further expand the breadth of our go-to-market intelligence, industry coverage, and addressable market opportunity. The combined business was incorporated as the former ZoomInfo Technologies Inc. (now ZoomInfo Intermediate Inc.) on November 14, 2019 for the purposes of facilitating an IPO. On June 8, 2020, ZoomInfo completed the IPO.

On October 29, 2021, ZoomInfo implemented a holding company reorganization in which ZoomInfo NewCo Inc., which subsequently was renamed “ZoomInfo Technologies Inc.,” became the successor registrant to its subsidiary, ZoomInfo Technologies Inc., which subsequently changed its name to “ZoomInfo Intermediate Inc.”.

Our corporate headquarters are located in Vancouver, Washington. The Company has additional offices in Waltham, Massachusetts; Bethesda, Maryland; Conshohocken, Pennsylvania; Grand Rapids, Michigan; San Francisco, California; Ra’anana, Israel; Toronto, Canada; Chennai, India; and London, England. Our primary website address is https://www.zoominfo.com. The information on our website is not incorporated herein or otherwise a part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Overview

ZoomInfo is a global leader in modern go-to-market software, data, and intelligence for sales, marketing, operations, and recruiting teams. RevOS – our modern, cloud-based operating system for revenue professionals – delivers comprehensive and high-quality intelligence and analytics to provide sales, marketing, operations, and recruiting professionals accurate information and insights on the organizations and professionals they target. This enables our customers to shorten sales cycles and increase win rates by empowering sellers, marketers, and recruiters to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

ZoomInfo defines the modern go-to-market technology stack across three distinct layers that build upon each other:

•Our Intelligence Layer is the foundation of our data-driven strategy. Our best-in-class data, curated through first- and third-party sources, includes billions of data points about companies and contacts, such as intent, hierarchy, location, technographic, and financial information.

•Our Orchestration Layer integrates and enriches our data sources. At this stage, our products assign and route data, leads, and insights to the appropriate people. This creates a dataset that is continuously updated and can be used to power automated business workflows. Our services connect with major customer relationship management (“CRM”) system providers.

•Our Engagement Layer allows sales, marketing, operations, and recruiting professionals to put data-driven insights into action to identify and communicate with prospects and customers. In SalesOS, frontline teams, managers, and leaders use Engage for multi-touch and multi-channel sales engagement, as well as Chorus for call and web meeting recording, transcription, insight generation, and coaching. In MarketingOS, marketers drive awareness, lead generation, and deal acceleration campaigns through account-based marketing, advertising, and onsite conversion optimization solutions, along with ZoomInfo Chat for intelligent onsite experiences through live conversation and chatbots. In TalentOS, recruiters and talent acquisition professionals access a database that helps them efficiently find candidates. Recruiters can filter and reach more good-fit candidates, use pipeline management tools to collaborate and organize the hiring process, and automate the candidate outreach process. In OperationsOS, our sales operations customers use a suite of products, services, and solutions to ingest, match, enrich, and connect data feeds into multiple systems.

We are able to deliver high-quality intelligence at scale by leveraging an artificial intelligence (“AI”) and machine learning (“ML”) powered engine that gathers data from millions of sources and standardizes, matches to entities, verifies, cleans, and applies the processed data to companies and people at scale. This data engine along with our team of research analysts and data scientists enrich our platform by providing deep insights, such as personnel moves, pain points, or planned investments, technologies used by companies, intent signals, decision-maker contact information, advanced attributes (such as time series growth, granular department and location information, and employee trends), organizational charts, news and events, hierarchy information, locations, and funding details. Our customers access insights directly in our platform and can also integrate our data and insights directly into their CRM system or sales and marketing automation systems, to improve their existing go-to-market processes.

Our Platform

Our modern, cloud-based operating system for revenue professionals delivers comprehensive and high-quality intelligence and analytics to provide sales, marketing, operations, and recruiting professionals accurate information and insights on the organizations and professionals they target.

We enhance the breadth of this intelligence with deep insights, such as personnel moves, pain points, or planned investments, technologies used by companies, intent signals, decision-maker contact information, advanced attributes (such as time series growth, granular department and location information, and employee trends), organizational charts, news and events, hierarchy information, locations, and funding details. All of this can be integrated directly into our customers’ CRM and sales and marketing automation systems.

This 360-degree view of key business insights provides detailed understanding, and coupled with our analytics, shortens sales cycles and increases win rates by enabling sellers, marketers, and recruiters to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Our intelligence is kept up to date in real time. This is accomplished through a combination of robust systems and processes leveraging AI, ML, and our proprietary human-in-the-loop approach.

Our Data Engine

We deliver high-quality intelligence at scale by leveraging an AI and ML-powered engine that gathers data from millions of sources and standardizes, matches to entities, verifies, cleans, and applies the processed data to companies and people at scale. We aggregate and extract distinct types of data, such as revenue, locations, technologies, keywords, contact information, including email addresses, titles, and phone numbers, and many others, from millions of public and proprietary sources. Our evidence-based ML algorithm scores, ranks, and makes determinations about these billions of data points each week. To help train our AI and ML technologies and augment our contributory network, we have a team of research analysts and data scientists with deep expertise in cleaning business-to-business data. This human-in-the-loop team plays a strategic role, focusing on quality assurance and addressing data and intelligence gaps that technology alone cannot solve. We have processes in place to use our research team to tag anomalies in data, review data pieces that require another manual verification, identify patterns to transform this understanding into algorithms, and identify methods to automate data gathering. We are able to provide a contractual guarantee of at least 95% accuracy with respect to certain data points as a result of our focus on quality.

Our Competition

We believe there are currently no competitors who offer a sales, marketing, operations, and recruiting intelligence platform as comprehensive as ours. We are able to provide revenue improvement; accuracy, depth and coverage of data; unique data points to leverage insights; and a platform that can be integrated and automated with a variety of CRM, marketing, operations, or recruiting platforms. In limited circumstances, we will see other vendors that focus on specific use-cases, niche end-markets, or leveraging legacy and/or inaccurate data sets try to compete in potential deals. These potential competitors include LinkedIn Sales Navigator, D&B Hoovers, and TechTarget.

We believe the principal factors that drive competition between vendors in the market include:

•comprehensive platform offering;

•quality and accuracy of data;

•breadth and depth of data;

•ease of use and deployment;

•tangible benefits relative to pricing and ROI for customers;

•data privacy and security;

•ability to integrate with customers’ CRM and sales and marketing automation systems; and

•sophistication of solutions used to manage, maintain, and combine intelligence.

We believe we compete favorably across these factors. We have achieved a median sales cycle of less than 30 days from opportunity creation to close. For additional information regarding the competitive business conditions we face, see “Risk Factors” in Part I, Item 1A of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Our Customers

Our large and diversified customer base spans a wide variety of industry verticals, including software, business services, manufacturing, telecommunications, financial services, media and internet, transportation, education, hospitality, and real estate. Our customers range from the largest global enterprises, to mid-market companies, down to small businesses. No single customer contributed more than 1% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023.

We sell access to our platform to both new and existing customers. We price our subscriptions based on the functionality, users, and records under management that are included in of our contracts. Our paid products are SalesOS, MarketingOS, OperationsOS, and TalentOS (with add-on options for some products), and we have a free community edition, ZoomInfo Lite.

Intellectual Property

Protecting our intellectual property and proprietary technology is an important aspect of our business. We rely on a combination of patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret laws in the United States and other jurisdictions, as well as written agreements and other contractual provisions, to protect our proprietary technology, processes, and other intellectual property.

We own a number of patents, registered trademarks (including ZOOMINFO and DISCOVERORG, among others), and copyrights in the United States. We also have a portfolio of registered domain names (including zoominfo.com) for websites that we use in our business.

In addition, we generally enter into confidentiality agreements and invention or work product assignment agreements with employees and contractors involved in the development of our proprietary intellectual property.

We intend to pursue additional intellectual property protection to the extent we believe it would be beneficial and cost-effective.

Data Privacy and Protection

The business contact information and other data we collect and process are an integral part of our products and services. Our respect for laws and regulations regarding the collection and processing of personal data underlies our commitment to top-notch compliance as well as our strategy to improve our customer experience and build trust. Our privacy team is devoted to processing and fulfilling any requests regarding access to and deletion of their contact information in our platform. In particular, we have developed a “Privacy Center” on our website as a one-stop-shop for any person to submit access requests, request opt-out, or delete their information from our database. We have implemented a program for providing direct notifications to individuals. In addition, we endeavor to honor opt-out requests across our entire database.

Our privacy and legal teams are focused on any applicable privacy laws and regulations and monitor changes to such laws and regulations with a view to implementing what we believe are best practices in the industry. Our sales, privacy, and data practices teams are well versed in helping customers and prospective customers navigate relevant privacy concerns and requirements with respect to our platform.

Regulators around the world have adopted or proposed requirements regarding the collection, use, transfer, security, storage, destruction, and other processing of personal data. In recent years, there has been an increase in attention to and regulation of data protection and data privacy across the globe, including the Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC”) increasingly active approach to enforcing data privacy in the United States, as well as the enactment of European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), the United Kingdom’s transposition of GDPR into its domestic laws in the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union (“Brexit”) in January 2021, California’s Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (“CPRA”), and similar comprehensive privacy laws adopted in other states, including Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, and Utah. Additionally, new state privacy laws are expected to become effective in 2024, including privacy laws in Oregon, Texas, and Montana, and additional states are expected to follow in future years. At the federal level, efforts have been made to establish a comprehensive privacy regime including many of the concepts found in other state and federal privacy bills and laws, such as consent requirements for entities providing services to the public that collect, store, process, use, or otherwise control sensitive personal information, and it is possible such a federal law could be enacted in the future. Meanwhile, around the world data privacy and protection laws continue to evolve, including new laws, such as India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act passed in August 2023 and the Saudi Arabia Personal Data Protection Law, which became effective in September 2023. There are also ongoing discussions about how best to revise and modernize existing laws in jurisdictions such as Canada and Australia. Laws such as these give rise to an increasingly complex set of compliance obligations on us, as well as on many of our customers. These laws are not always uniform in the way they define and treat certain data types, including business-to-business data, biometric data or so called “sensitive” data and we must often update our consumer notices and adapt our compliance programs to account for the differences between applicable laws. These laws impose restrictions on our ability to gather personal data and provide such personal data to our customers, provide individuals with additional rights around their personal data, and place downstream obligations on our customers relating to their use of the information we provide.

The FTC has also undertaken proposed rulemaking regarding commercial surveillance and data security, which is intended to address harms to consumers arising from lax data security or commercial surveillance practices. In addition, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) has announced plans to propose a rule in 2024 to regulate data brokers under its authority. This development follows a request for information about business models that collect and sell consumer data, including data brokers and aggregators.

These complex laws may be implemented, interpreted, or enforced in a non-uniform or inconsistent way across jurisdictions and we may not be aware of every development that impacts our business. These laws may also require us to make additional changes to our services in order for us or our customers to comply with such legal requirements. It may also increase our potential liability as a result of higher potential penalties for noncompliance. These and other legal requirements could reduce our ability to gather personal data used in our products and services. They could reduce demand for our services, require us to take on more onerous obligations in our contracts, add new provisions in data processing agreements (“DPA”) related to the processing of personal information, and restrict our ability to store, transfer and process personal data. In some cases, it may impact our ability or our customers’ ability to offer our services in certain locations, to deploy our solutions, to reach current and prospective customers, or to derive insights from data globally. One area of particular risk remains data transfers between the United States and the European Union. On July 10, 2023, the European Commission adopted its adequacy decision for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (“DPF”), 18 months after its predecessor, the EU-US Privacy Shield, was invalidated. While this does, for the time, assert that entities operating in the United States who have certified to the DPF ensure an adequate level of protection for transferring personal data from the European Union to the United States, future challenges seem imminent. The privacy advocacy organization NOYB, which previously challenged and facilitated the demise of both the Safe Harbor (Schrems I) and Privacy Shield (Schrems II) has already criticized the DPF for not doing enough to provide non-US citizens with reasonable privacy protections afforded to US citizens under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. ZoomInfo is certified under the DPF, but still utilizes Standard Contractual Clauses as its cross-border transfer mechanism due to the uncertain future of the DPF. In the event any court blocks personal data transfers to or from a particular jurisdiction on the basis that certain or all such transfer mechanisms are not legally adequate, this could give rise to operational interruption in the performance of services for customers and internal processing of employee information, greater costs to implement alternative data transfer mechanisms that are still permitted, regulatory liabilities, or reputational harm.

The cost of complying with existing or new data privacy or data protection laws and regulations may limit our ability to gather the personal data needed to provide our products and services. It could negatively impact the use or adoption of our products and services or products and services similar to ours, reduce overall demand for our products and services, or products and services similar to ours, make it more difficult for us or competitive solutions to meet expectations from or commitments to customers and users, lead to significant fines, penalties, or liabilities for noncompliance, impact our reputation, or slow the pace at which we close sales transactions, any of which could harm our business.

Furthermore, the uncertain and shifting regulatory environment and trust climate may cause concerns regarding data privacy and may cause our vendors, customers, users, or our customers’ customers to decline to provide the data necessary to allow us to offer our services to our customers and users effectively, or could prompt individuals to opt out of our collection of their personal data. Even the perception that the privacy of personal data is not satisfactorily protected or does not meet regulatory requirements could discourage prospective customers from subscribing to our products or services or discourage current customers from renewing their subscriptions.

Compliance with any of the foregoing laws and regulations can be costly and can delay or impede the development of new products or services. We may incur substantial fines if we violate any laws or regulations relating to the collection or use of personal data. Our actual or alleged failure to comply with applicable privacy or data protection laws, regulations, and policies, or to protect personal data, could result in enforcement actions and significant penalties against us, which could result in negative publicity or costs, subject us to claims or other remedies, and have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

For more information, please read “Risk Factors – Privacy, Technology, and Security - Changes in laws, regulations, and public perception concerning data privacy, or changes in the patterns of enforcement of existing laws and regulations, could impact our ability to efficiently gather, process, update, and/or provide some or all of the information we currently provide or the ability of our customers and users to use some or all of our products or services” in Part I, Item 1A of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Human Capital

As of December 31, 2023, we had 3,516 employees, consisting of 666 in cost of service, 1,596 in sales and marketing, 837 in research and development, and 417 in general and administrative. Of these, 74% of our employees were located in North America, while 12%, 12%, 2%, and less than 1% were located in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and Australia, respectively.

The Compensation Committee of our Board of Directors reviews and oversees our incentive compensation plans, while the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee of our Board of Directors oversees and approves the management continuity planning process.

Diversity and Inclusion

We place a high value on diversity and inclusion and are committed to ensuring that our organization creates a sense of belonging for all employees. Understanding that representation matters, as part of our ZoomInclusion Employee Resource Groups, we take an active role in focusing on the equity, advancement, and empowerment of individuals from diverse backgrounds. These groups have dedicated funding to host events, bring in speakers, and develop programs to help create a sense of belonging for all ZoomInfo employees. As ZoomInfo continues to grow, we want to empower all employees to excel in their professional objectives and feel proud to work for a company that celebrates their individuality while recognizing their differences.

We believe in the power of the team. Winning teams look for the best talent, regardless of background. We know that employees are our greatest asset, and we are proud of the diversity that we foster in our workplaces.

As of December 31, 2023, our U.S. workforce was approximately 27% ethnically diverse. Ethnically diverse is defined as individuals who self-identify in one or more of the following groups: Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Asian, Native American or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander or Two or More Races or Ethnicities. In addition, 33% of the Company’s U.S. workforce identified as female and less than 1% identified as not specified.

We are a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact, a global sustainability initiative that calls on companies to align their business practices with ten principles related to human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption.

In 2023, we publicly committed to the California Equal Pay Pledge, ensuring that fair and equitable pay, regardless of race or gender is a normal business imperative. We also signed the Anti-Defamation League's Pledge to Fight Antisemitism in further expansion of our diversity and inclusion work.

Benefits, Safety, and Wellness

We aim to offer fair compensation and benefits that encourage employee well-being, as well as attract and retain top talent. Our compensation packages provide a competitive salary and bonus, medical, dental, vision, retirement benefits, and generous paid time off.

We believe that in-person connections are fundamental to cross-functional partnerships, driving innovation, facilitating professional growth, and establishing critical relationships. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about unexpected changes to the global workforce, and we have adopted a hybrid model. This model allows employees who are assigned to an office to split their time between working at the office and at home.

Training and Development

Ensuring our employees have access to development opportunities and understand how to grow their career at ZoomInfo is a key tenet of our talent and engagement practices. As part of our efforts, we invest in robust learning offerings for all employees, consisting of both online courses and live training on a variety of topics (with targeted learning programs for individual contributors and leaders). To enable continuous development, growth, and recognition, we also run a comprehensive annual performance and talent review process, which enables professional development of our employees to drive their professional development in a way that also aligns with our company objectives and values.

Available Information

Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and other filings with the SEC, and all amendments to these filings, can be obtained free of charge from our website at http://ir.zoominfo.com/financial-information/sec-filings or by contacting our Investor Relations department at our office address listed above following our filing of any of these reports with the SEC. The SEC maintains an internet site that contains reports, proxy and information statements and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at www.sec.gov. The contents of these websites are not incorporated into this filing. Further, the Company’s references to the URLs for these websites are intended to be inactive textual references only.