Sales Intelligence & B2B Contact Data
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
One thing must be trueEntry turns on a single condition that can be named and tested before much is spent. Clear it and this becomes an execution question; fail it and no amount of operating skill helps.
Find something that compounds. Entry is achievable and so is the first customer; what is missing is a reason the next entrant cannot repeat it as easily as you did.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
The binding constraint — defensibility
The incumbent is shrinking and it still does not help you. ZoomInfo guided FY2026 to $1.207–1.217B with full-year revenue expected to fall about 3% at the midpoint, net revenue retention down to 89%, a restructuring touching roughly a fifth of staff and a $643.7M quarterly net loss on goodwill impairment. That is a category leader whose existing customers are buying less each year. The money did not leave the category — it moved one layer up. Clay, which owns no database and instead routes a query across other people's, went from $31M to about $100M ARR in a year and raised at a reported $7.1B. Owning the records is the commoditising half; orchestrating them is the half being bid up. An entrant who builds another national contact database is buying into the part that is deflating, against a field that already waterfalls across fifty suppliers and treats any single one as interchangeable. The exception is depth no aggregator carries — a local register, a vertical nobody has enriched, a jurisdiction the US vendors skip — which is a different market with a different buyer and should be screened on its own.
Sectors joined: Cybersecurity · SaaS · Technology · Dev Tools · B2B SaaS · AI
[UNVERIFIED] Sector-to-NAICS mapping is analyst judgment — see data/angel-sector-map.json. Counts are a per-record cross-reference and are not additive across records.
The incumbent
Who owns this market and who is coming for it. Fields a screen never reached say so rather than guessing.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
The field
Every vendor named on this record, and what each one discloses. Most disclose nothing, which is why the market is not sized.
Competitor set · 5 named · 1 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| ZoomInfo (GTM)A | $$1.207–1.217B guided FY2026 | — | Public and the only audited figure in the category. Shrinking: NRR 89%, revenue down ~3% at the guidance midpoint, repricing away from seats. |
| ClayB | not disclosed | — | Owns no database; orchestrates a waterfall across other providers. ~$100M ARR estimated, $115M Series D at a reported $7.1B — the clearest signal that value has moved to the orchestration layer. |
| Apollo.ioC | not disclosed | — | ~$150M ARR estimated. Last widely cited valuation $1.6B (Bain Capital Ventures, August 2023); one aggregator carries a materially lower $723M post-money for 2026. Sources disagree and neither is a disclosure — treat both as unconfirmed. |
| CognismC | not disclosed | — | $83M ARR at a reported $436M valuation. Strongest on EMEA coverage and phone-verified data, which is the one dimension where a regional vendor beats the US incumbents. |
| LushaC | not disclosed | — | $64.4M ARR at a reported $1.5B valuation — the widest gap between revenue and valuation in the set, and worth treating sceptically. |
Vendor landscape
Market leaders, the full paid field, and every open-source alternative. Where a free tier exists it is what sets the price floor, so it is analysis rather than an appendix.
FY2026 revenue guided $1.207–1.217B; NRR 89%
~$100M ARR estimated; $115M Series D at a reported $7.1B, September 2026
~$150M ARR estimated; valuation disputed between sources
Paid field · 8 vendors
The incumbent. Repricing from seats to platform fees plus data credits.
Routes one query across many providers; owns no records itself.
Database plus sequencer — competes with sales engagement as much as with data vendors.
Phone-verified contacts and stronger European coverage than the US incumbents.
Browser-extension led, bottom-up adoption.
Sells the records to other vendors — the layer beneath the tools.
Aggregate many providers per lookup. Their existence is what commoditised layer one.
The absorbed Clearbit. Enrichment as a CRM feature rather than a purchase — the pattern that caps standalone pricing.
Open source · none — there is no price floor
No open-source tier exists, and it cannot. The product is not software, it is a continuously re-verified corpus of people and companies. Code can be given away; the cost here is acquisition, verification and decay — contact data rots at roughly a third a year — so there is no volunteer-maintained alternative and there will not be one. The nearest things are public registers: open corporate registries, OpenCorporates, and government business registers. They carry firmographics but not people, which is precisely the gap the paid field sells into.
Read this category as two layers rather than one market. Layer one owns records — ZoomInfo, Apollo, Cognism, Lusha, People Data Labs — and is commoditising, because waterfall enrichment made any single supplier replaceable. Layer two routes between them — Clay, FullEnrich, BetterContact, LeadMagic — owns no data, carries no acquisition cost, and is where the valuations have gone. An entrant choosing layer one is buying the deflating half.
Evidence
Evidence. ZoomInfo figures are tier A, taken from its SEC filings and quarterly releases (8-K of 5 August 2026 and the Q1/Q2 2026 reporting) — it is the only company in the category that files. Every private figure here is tier B or C: ARR and valuation numbers for Clay, Apollo, Cognism and Lusha come from aggregators and press reporting, not from disclosures, and the sources contradict each other on Apollo's valuation by more than a factor of two. They are carried because the shape they describe is consistent across sources, not because any single number is reliable.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
Large free community for revenue, sales and marketing operations; where tooling comparisons actually get argued.
RevOps practitioners — the buyer for this category, discussing data quality and vendor substitution.
Unfiltered end-user reporting on data accuracy and bounce rates — the complaint volume is a better accuracy signal than any vendor benchmark.
Filed an assignment in bankruptcy in 2024; carried here only because older sources still cite it as the Canadian body.
The practitioner communities matter more than usual in this category, because the product claim that decides a purchase — match rate and accuracy — is one no vendor publishes and every buyer measures privately. Bounce-rate complaints in public forums are the closest thing to an independent accuracy benchmark that exists.