This Startup Cracked the Code on Sales Data—Now It’s Worth $1.25 Billion

Clay, a seven-year-old firm that shifted its focus to sales intelligence, has received a $40 million investment lead by Meritech, tripling its valuation to $1.25 billion in just six months. The startup, which assists organisations in locating and utilising sales data through AI-powered insights, has experienced major growth, projecting $30 million in revenue for 2024. This latest investment, an expansion of its $46 million Series B raised in June at a $500 million valuation, comes before Clay has spent any of its prior funds. “We didn’t need to raise, but our investors were seeing our traction, how we’ve been growing, and they wanted to double down,” said Kareem Amin, our CEO. “This allows us to invest in our sales motion, working heavily on our product very quickly, and just focus.”

Clay’s path to establishing a high-growth business has been anything but straightforward. When Amin co-founded the company in 2017 with Nicolae Rusan, the goal was to make programming more approachable to both engineers and non-coders. The company tried out several prototypes, including a no-code internal app builder that enabled professionals from multiple departments—accountants, marketers, and sales teams—to integrate external data and streamline procedures. The breakthrough, however, came from a specialised solution rather than a broad one: optimising go-to-market plans through the refinement of sales lead data.

This transition necessitated difficult judgements. Rusan and some other early employees left the company after it abandoned its coding tool and workflow management capabilities. However, reducing its emphasis paid off. Clay continued to see an increase in customers, eventually serving over 5,000 organisations, including OpenAI, Canva, Anthropic, Ramp, and Ripple. The company’s revenue grew tenfold in 2022 and 2023, and sixfold in 2024. “The strength of product-market fit they have is in the top fraction of the top 1% of companies scaling up in technology today,” stated Brett Berson from First Round.

The transition also resulted in the development of a robust ecosystem surrounding Clay. Over 90 small consulting firms now specialise in assisting other businesses using its platform, with several producing more than a million dollars per year. Its Slack network has expanded to over 18,000 active users, who share tactics and insights for maximising Clay’s possibilities. This network effect has strengthened the company’s position in the sales intelligence market.

Clay’s AI-powered platform enables businesses to surface critical sales insights efficiently. Traditionally, growth teams had to manually aggregate information from multiple sources—scraping websites, checking LinkedIn profiles, and purchasing data from providers. Clay automates this process, allowing companies to quickly find valuable prospects by analyzing patterns that might not be immediately obvious. “Every company needs to grow, and they need to grow in a way that is very specific,” said Amin. “We co-create that with them.”

One example comes from Intercom, which used Clay’s AI to uncover a surprising insight: businesses that mention “fertility” on their websites were more likely to need customer service software, regardless of their industry. “That’s something we would’ve never figured out before,” said Intercom’s director of revenue operations, Alexander DeMoulin. The ability to identify such unconventional patterns has made Clay an indispensable tool for companies seeking to refine their sales strategies.

The generative AI boom further accelerated Clay’s growth. By integrating with OpenAI’s GPT models and Anthropic’s Claude, Clay developed AI agents—called ‘Claygents’—that can autonomously research prospects, predict valuable data points, and return targeted lists. These agents help businesses find details such as all previous customers of a company or employees who worked in specific roles over time. Keith Jones, go-to-market systems lead at OpenAI, said his team relies on Clay for optimizing sales tactics. “In my professional opinion, they have one of the most practical and exciting applications of AI, in a decades-old practice that has long been stale,” Jones noted.

Clay’s pricing model has also contributed to its success. Unlike competitors that charge per batch of leads or per user seat, Clay operates on a consumption-based model, aligning its pricing with customer outcomes. “We became the distribution engine for these data companies,” said Varun Anand, Clay’s cofounder and COO.

Amin’s approach to constructing Clay has been meticulous, influenced by his past company experiences. Raised in Egypt, he began his entrepreneurial career as a youngster in Saudi Arabia, mending computers for money. After studying electrical engineering and physics at McGill University, he co-founded a content aggregation firm alongside Rusan, which later expanded into ecommerce and was acquired by Sailthru in 2012. The team then worked for The Wall Street Journal before launching Clay in 2017.

Clay’s latest funding round underscores investor confidence in its long-term potential. Meritech partner Alex Kurl sees Clay’s data intelligence approach as a sustainable differentiator in the competitive sales technology market. While companies like ZoomInfo offer similar data, Clay’s ability to integrate generative AI into the sales process sets it apart. “If Kareem was simply a go-to-market person, he would have just built a tool,” said Alfred Lin of Sequoia. “Those years of tinkering on wider use cases have now paid off as Clay’s software is more technically robust and capable of handling new AI features than a new entrant would.”

Clay intends to enhance its AI capabilities further, including incorporating first-party data from customers’ internal systems to improve targeting. The company recently completed its first purchase, Avenue, to improve its capacity to monitor intent signs such as hiring trends and funding rounds. The goal is to make Clay a comprehensive development environment for go-to-market teams, similar to how engineers use IDEs and cloud platforms to write and deliver code.

For Amin, the work remains dynamic. “Without that degree of freedom, I wouldn’t be as interested,” he said. “With music software, the deeper you get into it, the more powerful it becomes. We want Clay to be like that.”