Just stumbled across a little drama in the startup-o-sphere that impacts local company ZoomInfo. Apparently, well-funded startup 11x was sharing that ZoomInfo was one of their customers — including a logo on their site. Problem is ZoomInfo wasn’t a customer. And now they’re taking legal action.
“We did not give them permission to use our logo in any manner, and we are not a customer,” a ZoomInfo spokesperson told TechCrunch. The logo wasn’t removed until after March 6, when a source close to TechCrunch inquired about it. But even after that date, the company’s phone AI agent continued to repeat the customer claim.
ZoomInfo, which offers sales data and automation tools, conducted a short, one-month trial of the AI SDR from mid-January through mid-February, the spokesperson said. “During the pilot, 11x’s product performed significantly worse than our SDR employees, and we did not move forward afterward.”
And yet “since November, 11x has been claiming us as a customer in a multitude of channels: in sales calls, on its website, and now even on its AI dialer. We’ve spent the past four months demanding that they stop displaying our logo and falsely counting us as a customer,” the spokesperson said.
ZoomInfo’s lawyer is now threatening legal action, according to an email seen by TechCrunch from ZoomInfo’s lawyer to Sukkar. The lawyer wrote that he sees “several legal causes of action including but not limited to deceptive trade practices, trademark infringement, misappropriation of goodwill, and false advertising.”
Not the first time a startup has tried to bend the rules in an effort to get ahead. But just interesting to me because of the local angle.
For more on the situation, read “a16z- and Benchmark-backed 11x has been claiming customers it doesn’t have.”
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