Clay
Updated 2026-07-16GTM data orchestration and AI workflow platform used by OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Ramp. $202M raised at a $5B valuation. Recent ships: an API, CLI, and Agent Plugin for Claude Code and Cursor, a homepage repositioning to 'the infrastructure GTM engineers build on,' and Audiences.
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 a GTM data orchestration and AI workflow platform. It started in 2017 as programmable spreadsheets that pull live data from the internet, repositioned into outbound data enrichment in 2022, and now describes itself as 'the infrastructure GTM engineers build on.' Its July 2026 homepage refresh, the first in 18 months, named the shift from a list-cleaning point tool to a platform spanning data, agents, orchestration, execution, and governance.
The technical anchor is Claygent, the AI research agent Clay launched in 2023, which now runs 350 million GTM agents a month. Clay crossed $100M ARR in December 2025 and is repeatedly named by operators as the platform standalone sales-tech tools cannot compete with. As of mid-2026 it increasingly positions itself as a callable function layer invoked from inside Claude, ChatGPT, and OpenAI Codex, a tool the agent calls rather than a UI a human opens, backed by a dedicated API, CLI, and Agent Plugin.
Clay is widely credited with originating the 'GTM Engineer' role and has built the surrounding category apparatus: the AlphaForge training bootcamp, the Clay Cup competition, and the GTM Talent Hub. It also dogfoods heavily, publishing a 'Clay runs on Clay' series covering ABM, SEO and AEO, recruiting, and closed-lost analysis as first-party proof that competitors cannot easily match.
Best for
GTM teams that want to build custom enrichment, research, and outbound workflows on shared data infrastructure rather than buy a fixed point tool, especially those staffing dedicated GTM engineers.
Pricing & trial
Self-serve tiers run from a free plan (no card required) through Launch at $167/mo and a recommended Growth plan at $446/mo, with custom Enterprise pricing and 10% off annual billing. Pricing.
Agent Experience
How you build on this platform (or wire it into your own agents):
One of the stronger build-on options in its space: Clay exposes an API, CLI, an MCP server live in Claude and ChatGPT, an Agent Plugin for Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, and Functions that agents call directly.
Reference customers
OpenAI, Anthropic, Notion, Figma, Ramp, Google, Uber, Stripe, Canva, HubSpot, Intercom, Pendo, Slack, Rippling.
Case studies & customer stories
Recent moves
- 2026-07-09Shipped an API and CLI plus an Agent Plugin that runs Clay from inside Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. source
- 2026-07-02Refreshed its homepage for the first time in 18 months, repositioning from a data enrichment tool to 'the infrastructure GTM engineers build on.' source
- 2026-06-24Disclosed that Claygent runs 350 million GTM agents a month and published 'The Building Blocks of a Winning GTM Engineering System.' source
- 2026-06-23Launched Audiences for unlimited searches (no 50,000-row ceiling) and published its $1M to $100M ARR marketing playbook. source
- 2026-06-18Published 'How Clay uses Clay from inside Claude and ChatGPT,' framing the product as a callable function layer rather than a UI. source
- 2026-06-16Published a Pendo case study: 13,000 top-fit accounts surfaced in two days for a multi-product AI launch. source
Company, Financials & Funding History
Kareem Amin (CEO) 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 co-founder in 2021. Clay took six-plus years to reach its first $1M in ARR, then roughly two years to grow from $1M to $100M ARR by December 2025.
| Date | Round | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 2017-06 | Seed | $2.5M (First Round Capital) |
| 2024-06 | Series B | $46M at a $500M valuation (Meritech), disclosing a prior $13.5M Series A led by Sequoia; $62M total to date |
| 2025-01 | Series B extension | $40M at a $1.25B valuation (Meritech); $102M total capital |
| 2025-05 | Employee tender | $20M at a $1.5B valuation (Sequoia-led) |
| 2025-08 | Series C | $100M at a $3.1B valuation (CapitalG) |
| 2026-01 | Employee tender | $55M at a $5B valuation (DST Global); pure secondary, no new primary capital |
Analyst placement
Named to the Forbes AI 50 in April 2026, the only GTM company on the list, and ranked #3 on Brex's Spring 2026 list of fastest-growing software vendors by spend.