ZoomInfo built one of the largest B2B contact databases in the world by going broad: every industry, every company size, one platform. Arcova goes the other direction on purpose: one industry, life science, scored to your ICP with buying-readiness signals modeled around how biotech and pharma companies actually move. Neither replaces the other, and most teams that use both keep ZoomInfo for data and use Arcova to decide what to do with it.
What ZoomInfo actually does
ZoomInfo is a sales intelligence platform sold on an enterprise, quote-only basis, typically starting in the five figures per year for a small team and scaling well past that with per-seat add-ons for phone data, intent, and worldwide coverage. Plans generally require an annual contract. What you get for that is real: one of the largest and most maintained contact and company databases on the market, org charts, direct-dial phone numbers, and intent data built to work the same way whether you sell to manufacturing, SaaS, or life science.
That breadth is also the limit. ZoomInfo's data model is industry-agnostic by design, so it does not carry therapeutic area, modality, development stage, or clinical and regulatory milestones as first-class fields. A biotech and a bank look the same to the underlying schema: company size, revenue band, hiring velocity, and generic intent topics.
What Arcova adds on top
Arcova starts from the assumption that life science is the whole market, not one vertical among many. Fit is scored on the attributes that actually separate a good account from a bad one for a CRO, CDMO, or life science tools and services vendor: therapeutic area and modality overlap, development stage, and how closely an account resembles your best existing customers. See building an ICP as a CRO or CDMO for how that model works.
On top of fit, Arcova watches for the events that actually move a life science buying process: funding rounds, hiring into CMC, clinical operations, regulatory, and quality functions, trial phase transitions, FDA milestones, and conference activity, and rolls them up into a readiness signal so a rep knows not just who to call, but when.
| ZoomInfo | Arcova | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Horizontal B2B contact and company database | Life science fit and readiness layer |
| Industry scope | Every industry, one data model | Life science only, purpose-built |
| Life science fields | Not modeled (size, revenue, generic intent) | Therapeutic area, modality, stage, and more |
| Buying-readiness signals | General intent topics | Funding, trials, regulatory, hiring, conferences |
| Pricing | Quote-only, typically five figures a year | Free to start |
When ZoomInfo is the better fit
If your team sells horizontally across many industries and life science is only one segment of a much broader book, ZoomInfo's breadth is a genuine advantage that a life science-only tool cannot match. The same is true if direct-dial phone coverage and deep marketing automation integrations across your whole funnel matter more than vertical-specific scoring, or if your team already has the budget and process maturity to run a large enterprise data contract well. ZoomInfo has been doing that at scale for a long time, and for a horizontal seller, it is usually the right call.
Related comparisons
ZoomInfo is one of several data providers life science teams already use. See how Arcova works alongside Apollo, Clay, and SciLeads as well.