ZoomInfo (http://www.zoominfo.com), the premiere provider of business information, has spun off its bizographic advertising business unit into a new company, Bizo, Inc. (http://www.bizo.com), based in San Francisco. Former ZoomInfo GM and SVP Russell Glass will lead Bizo as its CEO. The Bizo spinoff is wholly funded by ZoomInfo. As a result, existing ZoomInfo investors, including Venrock, Flagship and Vulcan, are significant shareholders in the new company.
"ZoomInfo's profitability gave us the freedom to experiment with our technology in new and creative ways," said Jonathan Stern, CEO, chief scientist and founder of ZoomInfo, and cofounder
of Bizo. "We quickly realized that our business information index allowed marketers to deliver targeted online ads at a level never before seen. Establishing Bizo as its own company
allows Russell and his team to focus on building the largest targeted B2B advertising platform in the world to penetrate the multi-billion dollar online advertising market."
In October 2007, ZoomInfo (http://www.zoominfo.com) first unveiled plans to launch the industry's first bizographic advertising platform - an
advertising targeting platform based on people's "business demographics". Since then, Bizo has been operating in stealth mode, building its technology platform and signing partnership
agreements with multiple advertisers and publishers.
"As a marketer myself, I know that B2B marketers don't have many options for effective advertising online today," said Glass. "Giving them the ability to reach precise business audiences
across the web brings an exciting new toolkit to the B2B marketing space."
"ZoomInfo had a fantastic 2007, profitably exceeding $16 million in sales," said Bryan Burdick, ZoomInfo's president. "Our plan for 2008 is to continue our growth and maximize
opportunities in new markets. While B2B advertising is complimentary to ZoomInfo's business, the market has been starved for the ability to target business professionals online. Creating
a new business in order to meet that need was an ideal solution for us. ZoomInfo will continue to focus on building the most accurate and up-to-date database of business information, and
will provide a competitive advantage for Bizo's success."
Bizo (http://www.bizo.com) will continue to leverage ZoomInfo's (http://www.zoominfo.com) understanding of business
people and companies to allow marketers to target business users based on thousands of segmenting possibilities, including combinations of title, company, industry, functional area,
company size, education, location, etc. The company expects to publicly launch its bizographic advertising platform later in 2008 with over 20 million targetable business users in its
network.
About ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is a business information search engine used to quickly find information about industries, companies, people, products and services. ZoomInfo is used by sales and marketing
professionals to identify business opportunities, by recruiters to locate talent, and by anyone conducting in-depth research about products, services and businesses. ZoomInfo's semantic
search engine continually crawls the Business Web - the millions of company Websites, news feeds and other online sources - to identify company and people information which is then
organized into fresh, comprehensive and objective profiles. ZoomInfo currently has profiles on nearly 40 million people and over 4 million companies, and its search engine adds more than
20,000 new profiles every day.
According to Nielson/NetRatings, in April 2007 ZoomInfo was the fastest growing network in the country, with 276% annual growth. More than 6 million people search www.ZoomInfo.com every month. In addition, nearly 3,000 customers, including Yahoo!, Microsoft, Oracle, PepsiCo and 20% of the Fortune 500, use ZoomInfo's
patented search tools. ZoomInfo is privately held and based in Waltham, Massachusetts.