Clay
Updated 2026-08-16AI-native GTM data and workflow platform, positioned since July 2026 as the infrastructure GTM engineers build on. Customers include OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Figma. $202M raised, marked at $5B in a January 2026 employee tender. Recent releases: Workflows, Clay Ads 2.0, Account Research Agents.
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 started in 2017 as a programmable spreadsheet and found the GTM category in 2022 as an outbound data-enrichment tool. On July 2, 2026 it refreshed its homepage for the first time in 18 months and swapped "data enrichment tool" for "the infrastructure GTM engineers build on," naming five layers: data, agents, orchestration, execution, governance. The product moved with the language. Audiences (June 2026) retired the 50,000-row table ceiling for a persistent, refreshing layer. Account Research Agents (July 2026) put agents with memory and automatic CRM writes on top of it. Workflows (August 2026) added a node-based orchestration canvas where every run is traced, including what it cost.
The distribution strategy is to get called from someone else's surface. ChatGPT in December 2025, Claude in January 2026, a unified Clay MCP on all modern plans in April, OpenAI Codex in June, then API, CLI, and an Agent Plugin for Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor in July. "Clay for Reps" went GA inside Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Glean with the split stated plainly: ops sets the rules and the spend, reps chat for the data. Claygent runs 350 million GTM agents a month, disclosed by Clay's Head of AI in June 2026.
The category POV is the GTM Engineer role, and Clay treats it as an asset rather than a talking point. Andy Eung's April 2026 framing, "In 2024, Clay created the GTM engineer," is third-party attribution, and Clay operates the labor pipeline around it: the AlphaForge bootcamp, the GTM Talent Hub directory, and Clay Cup as a competitive bracket. The counterweight is consumption pricing. SaaStr's Agents series ran a segment on price hikes under Clay's credit model, and Clay's own answer was to make per-run cost a first-class traced field in Workflows.
Best for
GTM and ops teams that want to build their own systems on a data-and-agent substrate rather than buy a finished workflow, and that have a builder in-house to operate it.
Pricing & trial
Public self-serve tiers metered on actions and data credits: Free ($0, no card, 500 actions/mo), Launch $167/mo, Growth $446/mo, and custom Enterprise, with 10% off annual billing. Pricing.
Agent Experience
How you build on this platform (or wire it into your own agents):
One of the strongest build-on surfaces in GTM tech: documented API, CLI, an MCP server available on all modern plans, and an Agent Plugin that lets Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor search data, run Functions, and create or trigger Workflows without ever opening the UI.
Reference customers
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Uber, Stripe, Canva, Notion, Figma, HubSpot, Intercom, Ramp, Slack, Rippling, Pendo, Verkada, Northbeam.
Case studies & customer stories
- Pendo surfaced ~13,000 top-fit accounts in two days for a multi-product AI launch source
- Verkada on first-party signals as the GTM moat rented data can't match source
- Anthropic's Eleanor Dorfman uses Clay to enrich and score every inbound lead source
- Clay's own eight automated growth plays across self-serve and enterprise source
- Clay ran ABM on Clay: 300 accounts, 1:1 personalization source
Recent moves
- 2026-08-12Clay's Head of GTM Engineering published the company's full 2026 GTM stack and reported that the majority of it is bought, with internal builds limited to rep workflow and pricing. source
- 2026-08-11Workflows shipped: a node-based orchestration canvas with per-run tracing of inputs, failures, latency, and cost, buildable from the CLI, and no step or record limits. source
- 2026-08-11Clay published the eight product-usage growth plays it runs on itself, including churn-risk detection on first-month accounts and account agents monitoring roughly 100 tier-one accounts. source
- 2026-08-10Weekly product roundup shipped a redesigned Enrich Tab for browsing enrichment providers and a bidirectional Nooks integration that syncs engagement data back for account scoring. source
- 2026-08-04Clay Ads 2.0 reached general availability: unlimited ad audiences syncing to LinkedIn, Meta, Google, Bing, Vibe.co, and Reddit, with enhanced matching and EU-compliant audience construction. source
- 2026-08-03Weekly product roundup added a Usage Dashboard with time-series credit spend, CLI device login for headless environments, and a rebranded Claygent landing page. source
Company, Financials & Funding History
Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan founded Clay in New York in 2017 around programmable spreadsheets that pull live data from the internet, with First Round leading a $2.5M seed; Varun Anand joined as co-founder in 2021. Clay crossed $100M ARR in December 2025, which Anand called "a true 8-year overnight success story: it took us 6+ years to hit our first $1M, and ~2 years to grow from $1M → $100M."
| Date | Round | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-01 | Employee tender | $55M in employee shares at a $5B valuation, led by DST Global with Conviction, Avra, Operator Collective, and Frontline. Pure secondary, no new primary capital, priced off $100M+ ARR. |
| 2025-08 | Series C | $100M at a $3.1B valuation, led by Alphabet's CapitalG. |
| 2025-05 | Employee tender | $20M at a $1.5B valuation, led by Sequoia. |
| 2025-01 | Series B extension | $40M at a $1.25B valuation, led by Meritech, citing 6x growth in 2024 and bringing total capital to $102M. |
| 2024-06 | Series B | $46M at a $500M valuation, led by Meritech with Sequoia, First Round, Box Group, and Boldstart. The announcement also disclosed a previously undisclosed $13.5M Series A (Sequoia) and $2.5M seed (First Round). |
Analyst placement
No G2 Grid or Gartner/Forrester placement in the public record. Named to the Forbes AI 50 in April 2026 as the only GTM company on the list, ranked #3 on Brex's Spring 2026 list of fastest-growing software vendors by spend, and named a HubSpot Essential App for Sales in April 2026.