Clay is an AI-powered go-to-market (GTM) and data enrichment platform that helps sales and growth teams build highly personalized outbound campaigns and find best-fit accounts at scale. It combines dozens of data providers with AI agents in a spreadsheet-like interface, letting teams enrich, research, and act on prospect data without juggling multiple point tools.
Clay works by waterfalling across 75+ data sources to enrich records, then applying AI to research accounts, draft personalized messaging, and trigger downstream workflows. This approach gave rise to the "GTM engineer" role — operators who build automated, data-driven prospecting systems inside Clay rather than relying on static lists and generic sequences.
Clay was founded in 2017 by Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan. After years of steady building, the company saw explosive adoption as AI made automated personalization practical, reporting roughly 6x growth in 2024 and a path toward $100 million in revenue by the end of 2025.
The company's funding history reflects that momentum. Clay confirmed a $100 million Series C led by CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund) in August 2025 at a $3.1 billion valuation, with participation from Meritech, Sequoia, First Round, Boldstart, and Sapphire Ventures. This brought total funding to roughly $204 million, up sharply from earlier Series B and secondary valuations the same year.
Clay's traction includes customers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Canva, Intercom, and Rippling. Its key differentiator is the combination of broad data coverage, AI research and copywriting, and a flexible, programmable interface — competing with single-source enrichment tools like Apollo and ZoomInfo by acting as an orchestration layer across many providers rather than a single dataset.