Clay raises $100M to target Fortune 500 customers

Clay, the New York-based startup that automates the tedious grunt work of sales and marketing outreach, has raised $115 million in new funding as it pivots upmarket toward the Fortune 500. The round values the company at $3.1 billion, and signals where venture capital thinks the next wave of AI value gets created: inside enterprise sales pipelines.

Co-founders Kareem Amin and Varun Anand built Clay around a simple but stubborn problem. Sales and marketing teams spend enormous amounts of time manually researching prospects, stitching together data from dozens of sources, and personalizing outreach at scale. Clay’s platform automates that entire chain, pulling in data, enriching it with AI, and triggering workflows that used to require a small army of SDRs.

From scrappy tool to enterprise ambition

Clay was founded in 2017, but shifted its focus toward go-to-market automation around 2021 and 2022. The company now counts more than 10,000 customers, a list that includes OpenAI, Anthropic, Canva, Intercom, and Rippling.

Revenue has grown at a pace of multiple consecutive years of 6x to 10x growth. Clay expects to cross roughly $100 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025.

The latest raise follows a Series B of $46 million in 2024 and a $40 million extension in early 2025. Total primary funding now sits at approximately $204 million, with Alphabet’s CapitalG, Sequoia, and Meritech among the backers.

The GTM engineer and what it means for enterprise sales

One of Clay’s more interesting side effects is a job title it essentially invented. The “GTM Engineer” sits at the intersection of technical fluency and revenue strategy, someone who can wire together APIs, AI models, and CRM data to build outbound systems that run largely on their own.

Clay is expanding its network of what it calls “Claygencies,” boutique agencies that implement and manage Clay-powered workflows for clients. The product upgrades underpinning the new funding push include autonomous AI research agents, which can crawl the web, synthesize company information, and surface bespoke context that makes a cold email feel less cold.

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