ZoomInfo, the premiere provider of business information, has spun off its bizographic advertising business unit into a new company, Bizo, Inc., 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.

Bizo will continue to leverage ZoomInfo’s 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.

“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.”

In October 2007, ZoomInfo 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.

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.