Zip uses Kernel agents to fuel global expansion

150+ Reps

Series D

Procurement Orchestration

20,000

Duplicate accounts removed

100,000+

Accounts prioritized

HQ: San Francisco, CA

Founded: 2020

Website: ziphq.com

Zip runs on Kernel

“Our growing sales team used to manually review and tier their account lists. Kernel agents now do that across 100,000+ accounts.”

David Ma

VP GTM Strategy & Operations

Overview & Challenge

Zip is an agentic procurement orchestration platform that allows employees, stakeholders, and procurement teams to better connect with the world’s suppliers so that business can flow. The technology’s universal application to procurement challenges and Zip’s rapid growth required RevOps to frequently clean, enrich, and prioritize existing accounts as well as source new accounts to ensure target market coverage.

However, Zip’s ideal customer profile (ICP) was too specific to be identified using standardized industry codes from generic databases. These classifications were too broad to segment the market effectively. For instance, a broad "Software" industry does not distinguish between more specific sub-industries like "Healthtech," "Edtech," or "Fintech."

This lack of specific data meant sales representatives had to research and tier accounts manually, even with a detailed ICP already defined. Zip’s RevOps team also spent time manually correcting data inaccuracies. This approach was difficult to scale as the company grew.

Zip partnered with Kernel to remove 20,000 dead and duplicate accounts, enrich and prioritize over 100,000 accounts, and find over 20,000 new accounts in its expanding target markets. Using Kernel, sales reps only prospect accounts that genuinely meet ICP criteria, rather than relying on generic enrichment data. RevOps uses Kernel to efficiently plan global territories and allocate accounts for its AE and BDR teams.

Module deployment

AI Cleaning & Corporate Hierarchies:

As Zip expanded into new territories, it needed a clear framework for creating target account lists for Zip’s growing AE and BDR teams. The company's CRM data, however, was inconsistent due to previous enrichment from generic data vendors, making it difficult to segment the market effectively.

Zip’s RevOps team previously managed data hygiene manually. Tasks like fixing incorrect domains, removing duplicates, and correcting parent-child relationships, especially for strategic accounts such as those in the Fortune 500 and Global 2000 were vital. This situation was driven by a generic underlying low accuracy and data that did not account for corporate hierarchies.

Kernel first addressed these data quality issues by removing 20,000 dead and duplicate accounts. For the live accounts, Kernel identified and mapped corporate hierarchies, linking subsidiaries to their parent companies.

Unlike traditional vendors of corporate hierarchies like Dun & Bradstreet, which use generic databases that are often out of date, Kernel researches each company's relationships using current online data from news, websites, Wikipedia, PDFs, and more. This approach provides a clear, readable explanation for why each account was mapped within a family tree. With a foundation of clean data and structured account families, Zip could accurately define its account segmentation and provide a clear framework for its sales teams.

Case Study →

"Removing 20,000 dead and duplicate accounts was just the beginning. Kernel gave us corporate hierarchies that actually make sense, unlike the outdated generic databases we used before."

Melanie Tsoi

GTM Ops Senior Manager

Case Study →

“Kernel's custom industry verticals let us distinguish between Healthtech, Edtech, and Fintech prospects. This customization completely changed how we segment our market.”

Stephen Rickli,

Senior Director of GTM Strategy & Operations

AI Custom enrichment

Custom verticals

Zip’s ideal customer profile (ICP) was too specific to be identified using the standardized industry codes available in generic databases. Broad classifications like "Software" did not distinguish between more specific sub-industries such as "Healthtech," "Edtech," or "Fintech". This lack of specific data meant RevOps had to manually research thousands of accounts in spreadsheets in order to build account lists.

Kernel enriched over 100,000 accounts in Zip’s CRM with custom data points relevant to its business, including custom industry classifications, headcount, and revenue estimates.

On the industry side, Kernel worked with Zip to develop a custom industry classification system, tailored to Zip’s ICP, that focused on a company's business model and technology enablement. Instead of relying on broad industry categories, this allowed Zip to segment its market into more precise verticals. Each classification provided by Kernel includes transparent reasoning and traceable sources.

AI Custom enrichment

Custom firmographics

To provide more accurate firmographics, Kernel has developed its own headcount and revenue figures drawn from primary sources.
‍

Kernel Headcount:Kernel determines headcount by first checking primary sources like
The company's website
PDFs / Annual reports
Official registries (10Ks/10Qs)
Wikipedia.
If no direct evidence is available, Kernel uses LinkedIn data as a fallback.
We cross-check the LinkedIn headcount against the company's self-reported size and adjusts the figure based on the company's industry, country, and growth rate.
If no LinkedIn is available, Kernel uses other data points available about the company on the web to provide an accurate headcount figure.

Kernel Revenue:When available, Kernel sources revenue figures directly from primary sources like 
Annual reports (10Ks/10Qs)
Official filings
Website
News
Wikipedia.
If a number is not publicly reported, Kernel uses a custom estimation model that analyzes factors like industry benchmarks, company type, web traffic, and headcount to produce an estimate.

Based on these custom data points, Kernel built a prioritization engine for Zip. This engine was trained using Zip's ICP documentation and trained on data from its recent sales pipeline. The system scans both external sources and internal CRM data to identify signals of fit, such as rep notes, loss reasons for previously closed lost opportunities, and competitors mentioned in email exchanges. Kernel enables RevOps leaders to use every insight from every email exchange to prioritize account lists effectively.

The prioritization engine next assigns a tier to each account (e.g., "Tier 1 - Must Win") and provides a list of positive and negative signals that explain the reasoning behind the rank.

This allows Zip's go-to-market teams to apply a consistent targeting strategy to accounts in their CRM. Sales representatives can see not just which accounts to prioritize, but also the specific reasons why, allowing for more relevant outreach.

AI Account Sourcing

To find new accounts missed by generic data providers, Zip used Kernel to identify companies that fit its specific customer profile.

The process began with a search of Kernel's company universe for accounts that matched Zip's high-level criteria. The initial crawl yielded hundreds of thousands of top-level potential fit accounts. Kernel then applied Zip's detailed ICP filters to this list. The result was a smaller sample size of net-new accounts; however, RevOps knew each account was a good fit for Zip sales reps.

These accounts were checked against Zip's CRM to prevent duplicates before being added. Each new account was then enriched with Zip's custom data points, such as industry classifications, headcount and revenue estimates, as well as other relevant firmographics. Finally, the accounts were tiered using the custom prioritization engine so that only the best accounts were added to the CRM.

Case Study →

“Our reps now spend their time selling instead of researching. Kernel gives us custom enrichment embedded in the CRM."

Philip Front

Director, GTM Systems & Architecture

Summary:

Zip partnered with Kernel to build an accurate map of their market directly in the CRM and drive sales efficiency with clean, AI-enriched, and prioritized account lists.

Kernel cleaned Zip's CRM by removing 20,000 dead and duplicate accounts and mapping corporate hierarchies. Kernel enriched over 100,000 accounts with custom data, like specific industry verticals and accurate headcount and revenue, and built a prioritization engine to rank all accounts. Finally, Kernel identified tens of thousands of new accounts that fit Zip's ideal customer profile.

This provided Zip's growing AE and BDR teams with clean, prioritized account lists, enabling them to efficiently target high-potential customers and support the company's continued growth.

20,000

Duplicate accounts removed

100,000+

Accounts prioritized

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Zip uses Kernel agents to fuel global expansion

Zip runs on Kernel

“Our growing sales team used to manually review and tier their account lists. Kernel agents now do that across 100,000+ accounts.”

Overview & Challenge

"We are LLM-ing our accounts, territories, and enrichment with Kernel."

Module deployment

AI Cleaning & Corporate Hierarchies:

"Removing 20,000 dead and duplicate accounts was just the beginning. Kernel gave us corporate hierarchies that actually make sense, unlike the outdated generic databases we used before."

“Kernel's custom industry verticals let us distinguish between Healthtech, Edtech, and Fintech prospects. This customization completely changed how we segment our market.”

AI Custom enrichment

Custom verticals

AI Custom enrichment

Custom firmographics

Kernel Headcount:

Kernel Revenue:

AI Account Sourcing

“Our reps now spend their time selling instead of researching. Kernel gives us custom enrichment embedded in the CRM."

Summary:

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Hear from our other customers

“Kernel let me create stellar territories for 100+ reps in 1 week, including finding 15,000 brand-new accounts.”

“Kernel is critical to our sales strategy by ensuring everyone in the revenue function is aligned and focused on the right accounts of the right size.”

"With Kernel, we can be confident that our target market is well-defined and fully researched, allowing us to prioritise accounts by need, resulting in higher sales velocity."