NYT – Clay, a Sales Tool for the A.I. Era, Raises $100 Million at $3.1 billion valuation

August 5, 2025

Source: New York Times

The business of drumming up new business leads is a fairly timeworn process: Identify new prospects, get their contact information and then cold-call or email them until you get in.

But in the age of artificial intelligence, start-ups are promising to automate much of the drudgery, freeing up salespeople for higher-level work. And one of the faster-growing businesses in the field is Clay, a company based in New York.

Clay plans to announce on Tuesday that it has raised $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation, the latest sign that A.I.-enabled upstarts continue to find eager investors looking to buy into the next big thing.

The round was led by CapitalG, an investment arm of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Other participants included Meritech Capital Partners and Sequoia Capital. It comes around six months after the start-up raised money at a $1.25 billion valuation.

At its core, Clay helps sales representatives and marketers find new leads and turn them into customers. But unlike traditional service providers, the eight-year-old company takes a more technical approach that sometimes requires a kind of coding for its A.I. tools to essentially allow users to program its A.I. tools to identify promising business leads and keep tabs on existing customers.

Kareem Amin, Clay’s co-founder and chief executive, said that his company helped one customer search for warehouses in a specific area using Google Maps and tallied the number of occupied outdoor parking spots to identify which businesses were the most promising leads. Such a targeted approach to generating leads, he said, avoids having sales representatives push out even bigger floods of generic marketing pitches.

He likened his company’s product in some ways to Cursor, the popular coding tool that uses A.I. to drastically automate programming. (Cursor’s maker, Anysphere, also happens to be a client: “Clay is attached to all of our go-to-market functions,” said Jordan Topoleski, Anysphere’s chief operating officer.)

Clay says it sees its core user as a kind of “go-to-market engineer.” It coined that description in 2023, and investors were soon drawn to the company: “Clay is the only company that is taking an engineering approach to go-to-market,” said Jane Alexander, a partner at CapitalG

Clay was founded in 2017 by Mr. Amin and Nicolae Rusan, who worked together at an e-commerce company they had founded and at Dow Jones. They shared a nebulous business purpose of democratizing programming. A turning point for the company came when it began to focus its business on sales and marketing; around that time, Varun Anand, who had emailed Mr. Amin about business opportunities, joined and eventually became a co-founder and head of operations.

That business pivot has proved hugely lucrative. Clay now says that it has about 180 employees and more than 10,000 paying customers, including OpenAI and Google, and that its revenue is on track to hit $100 million by year-end, more than triple from what it collected last year. Mr. Amin added that the company was close to profitability.

Clay also burns relatively little cash, Mr. Amin said. “If anything, investors are trying to get us to spend more money,” he added.

Eric Nowoslawski, whose agency helps clients generate business leads (and who also worked at Clay), said that the biggest advantage — and disadvantage — of Clay was that its software integrated with a host of other tools, making it a powerful but unwieldy tool.

Mr. Amin acknowledged that accessibility was a challenge: “We have to make sure that we’re not adding so much power that it becomes too complex,” he said of Clay’s offering.

That said, the company faces robust competition, including from traditional data providers and other A.I. products. The data collector ZoomInfo, for instance, works with Clay — but has also introduced a competitor, GTM Studio, which compiles potential lead information into one area.

Separately, a whole field of lead generation agencies built on the software, known as “Claygencies,” has cropped up, as have approximately 60 user clubs around the world in which people swap tips and tricks.

“I think Clay becomes the default platform that every team uses to go to market,” Ms. Alexander of CapitalG added.

But what Clay and its backers argue is not in the offing is what skeptics fear about the A.I. era: a slew of spammy machine-written marketing and mass layoffs. Instead, they say, it allows sales representatives to focus on more personalized pitches and less on constantly tweaking contact databases.

“The things that Clay and a lot of A.I. does, they’re not tasks that we want to become professionals at,” said Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia. “Automatically updating the stuff for your leads — is that what we want to do?”

Read the original article on NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/business/dealbook/clay-ai-marketing-fundraise.html