Chorus.ai

Founders and structure: San Francisco and Tel Aviv

Chorus.ai was founded in 2015 by Roy Raanani, Russell Levy and Micha Breakstone, an Israeli-born cognitive scientist. The company was registered under the name AffectLayer, and its headquarters were in San Francisco, while its development center operated in Tel Aviv. Globes described it as an Israeli-American company. In 2017, during a $16 million funding round led by Redpoint Ventures, it employed 25 people in Israel and San Francisco. Raanani explained at the time that most managers don't have time to listen to their salespeople's calls, and that no one can learn from the thousands of meetings that take place every quarter.

What the system does in a sales call

The system joins salespeople's video and phone calls, records and transcribes them, and analyzes the content with natural language processing. According to VentureBeat, after the call the salesperson receives a summary and notes, with risk factors and opportunities to expand the deal flagged. Managers can gather important moments from calls into playlists and use them to train new salespeople. In 2020 the system had been trained on more than 30 million calls, and the company claimed its speech recognition was 25% more accurate on sales calls than general-purpose models. That figure comes from the company, not from an outside measurement.

Funding rounds and competition with Gong

In December 2018 the company raised $33 million in a Series B round led by Georgian Partners, bringing total funding to $55.3 million. In July 2020 it announced a $45 million round. By the time of the acquisition it had raised about $100 million. Its direct competitor was Gong, another Israeli company in the same field, and according to Calcalist the two systems were very similar in the way they analyzed calls.

The acquisition by ZoomInfo

In July 2021 ZoomInfo, a business information company for salespeople, announced it was acquiring Chorus.ai for $575 million in cash. According to Calcalist, the amount included a tax benefit worth more than $100 million, and ZoomInfo funded it from cash on hand and $500 million in additional financing. The original ZoomInfo was founded in 2000 in the US by Yonatan Stern, who was born in Jerusalem, and in 2019 it was acquired by the American company DiscoverOrg, which took on its name. The company's 200 employees, 40 of them in Tel Aviv, moved to ZoomInfo, and only one founder, Russell Levy, stayed on there. According to TechCrunch, PitchBook data pointed to a valuation of about $150 million in the last private round.

Closing the development center in Israel

In May 2026 ZoomInfo told its employees that it would close its development center in Israel by the end of the year, a move expected to lead to the layoff of about 300 employees. Calcalist noted that this was a sharp turn compared with the expansion in Israel five years earlier, with the acquisition of Chorus.ai. The company did not say whether it would keep any activity in Israel after the closure.