ZoomInfo had acquired Chorus.ai in July 2021 for approximately $575m in cash. https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/13/zoominfo-drops-575m-on-cho…. Chorus was valued (post-money) between $100m to $500m in their latest funding round in July 2020. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/chorus-ai/company_fi…. There have already been posts about the acquisition. As a refresher, Chorus is categorized as ‘conversation intelligence.’ It basically records Zoom and other conference calls, transcribes the audio to text, and provides a ton of conversation insights including searchability of key words. I have personally been on many calls where the meeting organizer includes Chorus to record the calls. It’s getting more prevalent.
The market leader in conversation intelligence seems to be a private company called Gong.io. They are valued at $7.25bn based on their funding round in June 2021. https://www.gong.io/press/gong-raises-250-million-in-series-…. That seems like a big number for an up and coming category such as conversation intelligence. However, some insights stood out to me in Gong’s press release.
- By 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels
- Increased ARR 2.3X between Q1 of 2020 and Q1 of 2021
- Reached 2,000+ customers including three Fortune 20 companies that recently joined Gong
ZoomInfo already has tremendous customer penetration and will be working on integrating the applications natively to offer more value. Seems to have a lot of upside, especially if their closest competitor is valued at over $7bn. This blog by ZoomInfo captures what Chorus does and how it fits into their overall vision https://blog.zoominfo.com/zoominfo-chorus/. Very very interesting read and makes me more bullish on the company. Some highlights below.
"With Chorus, the entire organization can make better decisions by surfacing insights and analytics that you would only get if you sat in on every sales or customer success call.
It’s impossible to listen to every sales call, every support call, and every recruiting conversation. Nor is it possible to read every piece of correspondence — but Chorus does all of that. It’s impossible for any single person to process all of that content, capture and record every word spoken, listen for and flag hundreds or thousands of key moments where keywords or phrases are mentioned, bucket them into specific categories, and convert hours and hours of interactions into searchable metadata — but through advanced AI insights, Chorus does that, too. It’s also impossible for humans to analyze all of the behavioral cues and sentiment captured during a meeting to predict outcomes with any degree of consistency — but Chorus can.
And that’s just Chorus alone.
Combined with ZoomInfo’s intelligence data and go-to-market motions, Chorus will change how go-to-market teams search for target accounts, monitor account activity, trigger automated workflows, and expand buying committees. In short, it will allow salespeople to enter meetings with complete intelligence about each participant and company. Together, ZoomInfo and Chorus will open doors where no doors existed before. The acquisition of Chorus will create new possibles for go-to-market teams everywhere."
Many more good insights in the blog post. Highly recommended read.