Clay
Updated 2026-05-26Clay is the AI-native sales tech platform spanning enrichment, scoring, and outbound execution. Customers include Anthropic, Slack, and Rippling. $5B valuation, $202M raised, $100M ARR crossed in December 2025. Recent ships: Claygent Builder, Clay MCP in Claude and ChatGPT, and Clay Functions.
Three scores, refreshed weekly from live market signals rather than a once-a-year analyst report. Presence is how established a vendor is in the market right now. Velocity is how fast they are shipping, raising, and winning customers. Agent Readiness is how easily your own agents can build on them through an API, MCP server, SDK, or CLI. Scores are relative across the vendors we track; the raw inputs ship in the downloadable dataset.
The Solution & Approach
Clay is the AI-native sales tech platform positioned at the center of the AI GTM Consolidation narrative, the counter-force to the sales-tech acquisition wave. It crossed $100M ARR in December 2025 and carries a $5B valuation on $202M raised, with 452K active users and 2.4B+ AI runs reported. Founded in 2017 as a programmable spreadsheet, it became a data-enrichment workbench with Claygent in 2023, then a full GTM-execution platform with Sequencer, Web Intent, Audiences, Functions, and MCP.
The distribution angle rides the LLM rails. Clay launched inside ChatGPT in December 2025, inside Claude in January 2026, unified both via Clay MCP in April 2026, and shipped Claygent Builder in May 2026, each move pulling agentic capability down a plan tier rather than gating it to Enterprise. Clay is also one of six companies in OpenAI's Frontier program.
Clay's category POV is GTM Engineering. Andy Eung's framing, 'In 2024, Clay created the GTM engineer,' captures the claim, and Clay now operates the full identity layer around it: the GTM Talent Hub, the AlphaForge training bootcamp, and the Clay Cup competition. It backs the position with dogfooded 'Clay runs on Clay' playbooks for ABM, SEO/AEO, ads, and recruiting, content a competitor cannot easily match.
Best for
Teams that want a single AI-native platform spanning enrichment, scoring, outbound execution, and agentic workflows, especially those building a GTM-engineering function instead of buying point tools.
Pricing & trial
Public self-serve pricing with a free plan ($0, no card) plus Launch ($167/mo), Growth ($446/mo), and custom Enterprise tiers; annual billing saves 10%. Pricing.
Agent Experience
How you build on this platform (or wire it into your own agents):
Strong build-on platform: Clay MCP runs in Claude and ChatGPT on all modern plans, Claygent Builder lets you spin up GTM agents in natural language free on every plan, and Functions plus an API reference expose Ops-built workflows to reps and external agents.
Reference customers
Anthropic, Slack, Rippling.
Case studies & customer stories
Recent moves
- 2026-05-21Eleanor Dorfman, Head of Industries at Anthropic, publicly names Clay as the enrichment-and-scoring layer for every inbound lead at SaaStr AI. source
- 2026-05-21AlphaForge GTME training bootcamp opens with 50 free spots, a four-week program for ops, sales, and engineering, applications closing June 4. source
- 2026-05-19Clay Cup Round 2 goes live: 32 GTM engineers from 25 countries in an elimination bracket for a $50,000 prize pool, streamed on YouTube and LinkedIn. source
- 2026-05-19Brex's Spring 2026 list of the top 25 fastest-growing software vendors by spend places Clay at #3. source
- 2026-05-07Claygent Builder ships in natural-language form, free on every plan including trials, letting users spin up, test, and deploy GTM agents inside Clay. source
- 2026-05-05demandDrive, an outsourced sales-development agency, joins Clay as a Studio Partner. source
Company, Financials & Funding History
Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan founded Clay in June 2017 in New York around the idea of programmable spreadsheets that pull live data from the internet. Varun Anand joined as a co-founder in 2021. The company took 6+ years to reach its first $1M and about two more to grow from $1M to $100M ARR.
| Date | Round | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 2017-06 | Seed | $2.5M (First Round Capital), at founding |
| 2024-06 | Series B | $46M at $500M valuation (Meritech-led, with Sequoia, First Round, Box Group, Boldstart); $62M total, also disclosed a prior $13.5M Series A from Sequoia |
| 2025-01 | Series B extension | $40M at $1.25B valuation (Meritech-led); $102M total capital |
| 2025-05 | Employee tender | $20M at $1.5B valuation (Sequoia-led) |
| 2025-08 | Series C | $100M at $3.1B valuation (CapitalG) |
| 2026-01 | Employee tender (second) | up to $55M employee equity at $5B valuation (DST Global) |
Analyst placement
Named to the Forbes AI 50 in 2026 as the only GTM company on the list (source), and ranked #3 on Brex's Spring 2026 list of fastest-growing software vendors by spend (source).