Last Updated: 10 September 2026
Clay, an AI go to market company that helps sales and marketing teams find customers and automate growth work, is expanding its focus on AI agents for revenue teams. The New York company was founded in 2017 by Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan, with Varun Anand joining as a cofounder in 2021. Its software now combines business data, automation, and AI tools that can recommend and carry out sales and marketing tasks.
AI is already becoming common in sales organizations. Salesforce’s 2026 State of Sales report found that 87% of sales organizations use some form of AI, while 54% of sellers said they have used AI agents. Nearly nine in ten sales teams use agents today or expect to within two years, with the technology being applied to tasks such as prospecting, research, quoting, and other sales work.
Clay has raised $115 million in Series D financing at a $7.1 billion valuation. Wellington led the round. Sequoia, StepStone, a16z Perennial, Meritech, DST, CapitalG, BoxGroup, Boldstart, Bloomberg Beta, and Evolution also participated. The company now serves more than 17,000 customers, including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, ElevenLabs, Workday, and Siemens.
AI sales agents are software systems that can carry out several connected tasks with limited manual input. In sales, these tasks can include researching potential customers, identifying buying signals, preparing personalized material, updating customer records, and starting outreach. Salesforce describes AI sales agents as autonomous applications that can perform sales tasks with little or no human input. Clay calls the people who build and supervise these systems “GTM Engineers,” meaning go to market engineers.
Data quality remains an issue. Salesforce found that 46% of sales professionals using agents said problems with data quality hurt sales, while 51% said security concerns had delayed AI initiatives. These systems depend on accurate information about customers, products, and previous interactions if they are going to make useful recommendations.
Clay brings several types of information into one system. This includes CRM records, product usage, calls, emails, and campaign engagement, together with outside signals such as funding events, hiring activity, and job changes. The software uses that information to build a current view of a company’s target market and lets teams create workflows using plain English, while still allowing them to inspect and adjust each workflow.
Clay has not disclosed a detailed breakdown of how the new $115 million will be spent. Its stated product direction includes expanding the agents and infrastructure behind what it describes as a self learning revenue engine. The system is designed to learn from the results of previous campaigns and use those outcomes when making future recommendations.
A team could, for example, ask the platform to find marketing leaders at fintech companies. The software can then research those businesses, create tailored presentations, and prepare outreach. Information from later prospect conversations, including contract timing and repeated pricing questions, can also be retained and applied to future workflows. More product launches are also planned. They will be previewed at the company’s second annual Sculpt user conference in San Francisco on October 8.
“We're building a self-learning revenue engine. The better a company gets at learning, the faster it grows.”
Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Clay
A $1 million scholarship fund was also announced to train more GTM engineers. People entering this type of work come from backgrounds including revenue operations, growth marketing, software engineering, and design. The fund is intended to help more people learn how to build and manage automated revenue systems.
Clay started in Brooklyn in 2017 as a spreadsheet style product that allowed users to connect information and automate tasks without writing code. Salespeople, growth teams, and small agencies later began using the software to find and reach customers. That use led the business to focus more directly on those users and learn from what they were building.
The platform now combines several sales and marketing functions. Clay’s data marketplace connects customers with more than 200 data and AI providers. Its tools can enrich CRM records, research companies and people, monitor signals that may show customer interest, create lists of target accounts, run automated workflows, and support outreach through channels including email and advertising.
More than 17,000 companies now use the software, including 80% of the Forbes AI 50. Clay is headquartered in New York and is led by cofounder and CEO Kareem Amin. Its current product direction allows users to describe business goals in ordinary language and use AI agents to help turn those goals into workflows that can be reviewed and adjusted.
Clay’s earlier financing includes a $2.5 million seed round led by First Round Capital and a previously unannounced $13.5 million Series A led by Sequoia. Meritech led a $46 million Series B in June 2024 at a $500 million valuation. It later led a $40 million Series B expansion in January 2025, when Clay was valued at $1.25 billion.
Clay’s funding history also includes a $100 million Series C led by CapitalG in August 2025 at a $3.1 billion valuation. Two employee tender offers followed. Sequoia led a $20 million transaction in May 2025 at a $1.5 billion valuation, while DST led a $55 million tender in January 2026 at a $5 billion valuation. These transactions provided liquidity to employees rather than new operating capital for the company.
The new Series D is Clay’s latest primary funding round. Wellington led the financing, with Sequoia, StepStone, a16z Perennial, Meritech, DST, CapitalG, BoxGroup, Boldstart, Bloomberg Beta, and Evolution participating. An earlier community equity round also forms part of the company’s funding history alongside its primary rounds and employee tender offers.
