One of the stories we’ve been chasing this year is growth of the B2B data market. Here’s another episode: ZoomInfo, formerly known as DiscoverOrg, has filed for a $500 million Initial Public Offering. The S-1 shows $293 million revenue in 2019 and a $84 million loss, due mostly to $102 million interest expense on $1.2 billion in long term debt.
There’s nothing like a juicy CDP funding to start the week. mParticle has obliged with a $45 million Series D extension, bringing its total to $121 million and vaulting it from ninth to fourth place on the most-funded-CDP list. They also announced a LiveRamp partnership to append external identity data to a company’s own information.
It seemed little more than a rare bit of cosmic justice when someone stole the user list of privacy-busting facial recognition service Clearview AI. But there’s more to the story: while Clearview claimed it sold only to U.S. domestic law enforcement agencies, the list includes many foreign entities and private businesses including Macy’s, Walmart, and the NBA. So they were an even bigger danger than it seemed – if you were foolish enough to believe them in the first place.
There may have been a change of administration but the Trump Department of Justice is still calling for Google to sell its Chrome browser. The demand was repeated in a proposal signed by acting assistant attorney general Omeed Assefi. “Google’s conduct presents genuine danger to freedom in the marketplace and to robust competition in our economy,” the filing said.