CEO Henry Schuck in ZoomInfo’s downtown Vancouver headquarters. The company’s IPO made him an instant billionaire.

Vancouver marketing data broker ZoomInfo raised more than $900 million in its initial public offering Thursday, defying the coronavirus outbreak with the region’s biggest IPO ever.

Thursday’s offering values the Vancouver, Washington, company at $9.3 billion, making it the second-most valuable based in the Portland area, trailing only Nike. ZoomInfo began selling shares under the ticker symbol ZI on the Nasdaq exchange at $21 apiece, well above the $16 to $18 it had targeted last week.

The debut demonstrates both investor enthusiasm for ZoomInfo’s business and Wall Street’s optimism that the economy will ride out the coronavirus outbreak. There hadn’t been any major U.S. IPOs during the pandemic, but ZoomInfo’s big debut Thursday followed a big public offering from Warner Music on Wednesday that valued that company at nearly $13 billion.

The coronavirus outbreak prevented ZoomInfo from ringing the opening bell in person, overlooking the trading floor, as newly public companies customarily do. ZoomInfo did it virtually instead Thursday, with corporate images displayed on a giant video billboard above Manhattan.

Although ZoomInfo now ranks near the top among the Portland area’s largest companies, it’s not widely known in the region. That’s partly because it changed its name from DiscoverOrg last year, taking the name of a Massachusetts rival it acquired.

Its business is also somewhat arcane — hoarding data on large organizations and their personnel, then selling that information to marketers who use it to target their sales pitches.

And ZoomInfo isn’t a major employer, with about 1,300 workers across the company.

CEO Henry Schuck, 36, started DiscoverOrg in 2007 and continues to run the business. He had previously been a vice president of another business intelligence company, iProfile.

ZoomInfo paid Schuck $4.6 million last year, but he controls about a fifth of the company’s stock. So Thursday’s IPO makes him an instant billionaire, with shares worth about $1.6 billion.

ZoomInfo had sales of nearly $300 million last year, doubling its revenue by virtue of the big acquisition. The Vancouver company lost $78 million, owing primarily to interest payments on $1.2 billion in long-term debt.

Wall Street has recovered most of the value stocks lost in the early days of the pandemic, when stocks fell by roughly 30%. But the coronavirus is taking a severe toll on the broader economy, which ZoomInfo acknowledged in its IPO filing.

The Vancouver company said it has laid off 100 employees this spring due to the economic impacts of the coronavirus, and the company said it expects “slowed growth or decline in new customer demand” due to the pandemic.