Daily Crunch: ZoomInfo announces plans to acquire sales intelligence tool Chorus.ai for $575M

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 13, 2021. Have you gotten into the fake meat craze yet? Or are you sitting on the sidelines still, holding a turkey leg in one hand and a bacon sandwich in the other? The good news for primitive humans like you and me is that more fake meat is cropping up in more places. Like Beyond Meat’s fake chicken at Panda Express.

Look, I love to be a carnivore. But I don’t love the carbon footprint. Maybe tech companies will chart a more sustainable path for the rest of us. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Apple gets into the external battery game: If you’re anything like me, your mobile phone is usually about to die. If you own an iPhone, there’s good news today in the form of Apple announcing a $99 battery pack that will provide wireless juice to your handset. It snaps to the back of the phone. Frankly, I am irked that I need this, but I do.
• There have never been so many great startups: That’s what TechCrunch learned today from investors. The U.S. venture class said that high prices weren’t keeping them on the sidelines, and that you essentially have to pay up to stay in the game. So if you are a founder with a good growth story, congratulations on your salad days.
• For example, Zomato just raised more money before its IPO: The Indian food delivery startup is looking to list this week at the high end of its range, with 45% of the $1.3 billion it plans to raise coming from its anchor investors. That’s some hot demand.

Startups/VC

First up from our startup digest today is a piece from our own Danny Crichton announcing the winding down of The TechCrunch List. The original idea was simple: “A curated directory of venture capitalists designed to guide founders to the VCs most relevant to their startups.”

But after reading thousands of entries and building out a huge database, the experiment went a bit stale. Here’s Danny on what happened: “The venture capital industry has radically changed over the past year, and the central thesis we used in constructing the list no longer applies.” Why? Because the venture capital world has become more competitive, quicker and geographically flatter. So terms and pricing matter more, we’re told, than expertise.

Consider that fact duly noted. Now, our usual rundown of funding events, from smallest to largest:

• AttackIQ raises $44M to help companies manage breaches: It does so in an interesting manner, by simulating attacks themselves. It’s a bit like having a scrimmage match against yourself. The latest AttackIQ deal underscores just how valuable cybersecurity startups have proven to be in recent months.
• Marco Financial raises $82M to fund LatAm exporters: The Miami-based, trade-focused startup raised $7 million in cash and $75 million in credit to help grow its business. Marco Financial uses a “tech-enabled risk assessment platform” to determine creditworthiness, which is neat. Anything to provide more capital access to more people in more places.
• Amperity raises $100M, becomes unicorn: What does it do? The startup built a customer data platform to help big companies better understand to whom they sell. As our own Ingrid Lunden reports, the startup is working in a world where some traditional methods of tracking customers — like browser cookies — are fading from our shared reality.
• Sourcegraph raises $125M for its code-search tool: This is an interesting one. Now worth $2.625 billion — up 3x from its December round — Sourcegraph is on fire. Other reporting indicates that the company could be at around a $10 million annual run rate. That’s, ahem, a healthy multiple.

5 advanced-ish SEO tactics to win in 2021

The days of gaming search engines to drive traffic are long gone. Startups that want to be noticed must invest in producing high-quality content that accurately describes their products and services.

Beyond the basic best practices you’ll find on SEO blogs and newsletters, Mark Spera, head of growth marketing at Minted, offers five “advanced-ish” tactics “to increase your SEO throughput and capitalize on some of the arbitrage still left in organic search.”

Strategy No. 1? Start out by using content-generation tools to automate tasks like creating search-friendly headlines, titles and blog outlines.

“We’ve been able to bring our article-writing process down from four hours per article to around 90 minutes,” writes Spera. “Imagine what you could do with all that time!”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Yes, there was other Big Tech news apart from Apple’s battery pack today. Here’s what you need to know:

• Discord buys Sentropy: Discord is a big company today, with lots of staff, lots of users and a big valuation. And it just bought Sentropy, a startup that TechCrunch wrote “makes AI-powered software to detect and remove online harassment and hate.” Given that some loathsome groups use Discord here and there, the buy makes sense.
• Facebook wants to pay bug hunters more: A new Facebook program called the “Payout Time Bonus” may boost fees paid to bug hunters in the social network’s world. The company pays out less per year than some other megacorps, but the gap could tighten thanks to the new effort.
• ZoomInfo buys Chorus.ai for $575M: Early today news broke that ZoomInfo, a public company, will drop more than half a billy on Chrous.ai, a company that provides sales intelligence tools focused on conversations. It’s related to what Gong.io is building, though Gong remains independent and worth around 13 times as much.

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