Clay Raises $115 Million at $7.1 Billion Valuation as AI Agents Redefine Sales

New York-based Clay, an AI-powered go-to-market platform, has raised $115 million in Series D funding, lifting its valuation to $7.1 billion. The new valuation is more than double the $3.1 billion valuation the company reached after its Series C round in August 2025.

The latest investment highlights growing investor confidence in AI agents that can do more than assist sales teams—they can increasingly research prospects, identify opportunities, create campaigns and execute revenue-generating workflows.

Wellington Management Leads the Round

The Series D was led by Wellington Management, with participation from a broad group of existing and new investors, including Sequoia Capital, StepStone, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Perennial, Meritech, DST, CapitalG, BoxGroup, Boldstart Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and Evolution Equity Partners.

Clay has now attracted significant backing from some of the technology industry's best-known investors as it moves beyond traditional sales software toward becoming an AI-powered growth infrastructure company.

From Sales Automation to Autonomous Growth

Clay started with a relatively simple problem: helping sales and growth teams find the right potential customers and personalise their outreach.

The platform has since evolved considerably. It combines data from numerous sources with AI-powered research and automation, allowing businesses to identify prospects, enrich customer information and build highly targeted campaigns.

Today, Clay's AI agents can help research companies and leads, generate personalised outreach, create presentations and follow-up campaigns, and automate multi-step go-to-market processes.

The company's bigger ambition is to create what it describes as an AI growth engine for companies—one where AI agents can continuously learn from campaigns and determine what actions should happen next.

More Than 17,000 Companies Are Using Clay

Clay's customer base has expanded rapidly. The company now serves more than 17,000 customers, including major technology and enterprise companies such as Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, ElevenLabs, Workday and Siemens.

Anthropic, for example, uses Clay to automatically research potential leads, while Airbnb uses the platform to identify hosts for its Experiences business. DoorDash has also used Clay to identify companies that could become customers for its employee lunch programme.

Clay says its platform is now used by 80% of the companies on the Forbes AI 50, demonstrating how deeply its tools have moved into the modern AI and technology ecosystem.

Strong Revenue Growth

Clay's rapid valuation growth has been supported by strong business performance.

The company grew revenue approximately fourfold during 2025, and CEO Kareem Amin said annualised revenue was on track to reach around $200 million during the current quarter and approximately $240 million by the end of the fiscal year. Co-founder Varun Anand said the company expects to double annualised revenue again next year.

The company has also maintained relatively low cash burn and was briefly profitable earlier in 2026, according to The New York Times.

The Founders Behind Clay

Clay was founded in 2017 by Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan, with Varun Anand joining as a co-founder in 2021.

Kareem Amin — Co-Founder & CEO

Kareem Amin is Clay's co-founder and CEO. His background combines engineering, product development and entrepreneurship.

Before Clay, Amin co-founded Frame, a company that built tablet storefronts for e-commerce businesses and was acquired by Sailthru in 2012. He subsequently held product roles at Sailthru and The Wall Street Journal before turning his attention to building Clay.

Today, Amin is leading Clay's push to move beyond sales automation and build AI agents capable of operating significant parts of a company's growth function.

Varun Anand — Co-Founder & Head of Operations

Varun Anand joined Clay in 2021 and became a co-founder. He currently serves as the company's Head of Operations.

Anand has been closely involved in scaling Clay's commercial operations and expanding its customer base toward larger enterprises. He has highlighted the company's increasing focus on major customers and the opportunity to build AI-driven systems that can handle increasingly sophisticated go-to-market activities.

Nicolae Rusan— Co-Founder

Nicolae Rusan co-founded Clay alongside Kareem Amin in 2017. The founding team originally set out with a broader vision around making powerful, flexible software building blocks accessible to people without traditional programming backgrounds.

Over time, that vision evolved into Clay's current focus on helping sales and marketing professionals build sophisticated revenue systems using data, automation and AI.

AI Agents Could Change the Sales Function

Clay believes the next major shift in sales will be from software that simply assists people to AI agents that can execute entire workflows.

Instead of a sales professional manually researching a company, finding contacts, writing an email, preparing a presentation and scheduling follow-ups, Clay's agents can increasingly coordinate these steps automatically.

The company's vision is that AI agents will analyse signals, determine the next best action and execute it—while teams retain control over the underlying data and workflows.

This puts Clay in a rapidly expanding market where companies are experimenting with AI agents not just as productivity tools, but as digital workers capable of completing multi-step business processes.

Building a New Category of Go-to-Market Engineers

Clay has also helped popularise the idea of the Go-to-Market Engineer (GTME)—professionals who combine data, automation, AI and creative problem-solving to build revenue systems.

The company introduced the GTME concept in 2023, and thousands of professionals are now working in this emerging role. Clay says these professionals have formed nearly 100 Clay Clubs around the world, creating a growing community around AI-powered sales and growth.

As part of its latest announcement, Clay also launched a $1 million GTME scholarship fund designed to help more people enter and develop skills in this emerging profession.

What Comes Next for Clay?

The latest funding gives Clay more resources to expand its AI-agent capabilities, attract larger enterprise customers and continue building its position in the rapidly changing sales technology market.

While Clay is not currently planning an IPO, Kareem Amin and Varun Anand have said they are operating the company with the discipline of a business that could eventually go public.

With more than 17,000 customers, rapidly growing revenue and a $7.1 billion valuation, Clay is increasingly positioning itself as something larger than another sales automation platform.

Its long-term bet is straightforward: AI agents could become the operating layer for how companies find customers, create demand and grow—and Clay wants to build that layer.