AI-Powered Sales Automation Startup Clay More Than Doubles Valuation To $3.1B

Sales automation startup Clay has raised $100 million in a Series C round of funding that more than doubles the company’s valuation to $3.1 billion, the company told Crunchbase News on Tuesday.

Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG, led the round. Existing backers Meritech Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, BoxGroup and Boldstart Ventures, as well as new investor Sapphire Ventures, also participated.

Notably, the financing comes just six months after New York-based Clay announced it had secured $40 million at a $1.25 billion valuation in a Series B extension led by Meritech Capital.

In May, Clay completed a tender offer led by Sequoia at a $1.5 billion valuation. The latest infusion brings Clay’s total raised to $204 million since its 2017 inception. The company told Crunchbase News that it “hasn’t touched” the last round it raised.

Clay’s platform aims to “transform” traditional sales and marketing operations, building automated workflows that it says can research thousands of prospects, personalize outreach at scale, and identify revenue opportunities “that would be impossible to find manually.”

It integrates with more than 150 data sources, and its AI agents can perform research tasks such as monitoring competitor mentions to trigger personalized campaigns, or analyzing satellite imagery to count warehouse parking spots as a predictor of customer fit.

The company also claims to have developed something it calls a “GTM (go-to-market) engineering role.”

Kareem Amin and Varun Anand, co-founders of Clay.

“GTM engineering represents the first true AI-native profession, and we believe that it will be tech’s next big job category,” said Kareem Amin, CEO and co-founder of Clay, in a written statement. Amin originally founded Clay and was joined by co-founder Varun Anand in 2021.

Anand told Crunchbase News via email that Clay first coined the role of GTM engineering in 2023.

“GTM engineers combine growth acumen with AI and automation to build revenue engines. We call it ‘engineering’ because they work within certain parameters to build scaled systems — but instead of coding software, they’re coding revenue,” he said.

Clay raised another round to fuel the growth of GTM engineering and make “major” product upgrades, including autonomous agents for research and messaging, the ability to use first-party data, and better signals, according to Anand.

While Clay did not disclose hard revenue figures, it notes that its revenue is “on track to more than triple this year.” The company’s 10,000-plus customers include OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Canva, Intercom and Rippling.

For its part, CapitalG said in a blog post that over the past 18 months, it spoke with more than 100 sales and marketing leaders, studied past approaches to the sales and marketing stack, and projected how AI would change go-to-market. Its goal was to develop its perspective on the next era of go-to-market technology.

“Ultimately that work culminated in our deep conviction that Clay will become the de facto go-to-market platform for the AI era,” wrote Jane Alexander — who previously served as CMO of Carta — and CapitalG investor Will Noddings.

“For decades GTM teams have had to deal with a suite of point solutions that chip away at pain points but in aggregate created a Frankenstein’s monster of disconnected tools,” they added. “For the first time, Clay gives revenue teams a single platform from which they can launch any campaign, limited only by their imaginations.”