Clay co-founders Kareem Amin and Varun Anand. Credit: Clay Clay has raised $115m in a Series D round that values the New York go-to-market software company at $7.1bn. Wellington Management led the round, the company said in its announcement on Wednesday. The New York Times broke the news, in a DealBook story by Michael J. de la Merced.
The paper reported that Clay’s previous round, a $100m raise in August 2025, valued it at $3.1bn. The new price is more than double that. Existing investors returned alongside Wellington. They include Sequoia, StepStone, Andreessen Horowitz’s Perennial fund, Meritech, DST, CapitalG, BoxGroup, Boldstart, Bloomberg Beta and Evolution.
From data to agents Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan founded Clay in 2017, and Varun Anand joined as a third co-founder in 2021. According to Tech Funding News, the original idea was to make programming accessible to people who could not code. The company has since narrowed its focus to sales and marketing, or go-to-market (GTM), teams. The platform pulls together a company’s own records, from CRM data and product usage to calls and emails.
It then adds outside signals, such as funding rounds, hiring activity and job changes. AI agents use that combined picture to find prospects, research them and set up outreach. Clay gives an example in its announcement. A team asks it to book meetings with fintech marketing leaders.
If a prospect later mentions when their contract ends and asks about pricing, the system notes the timing. If other prospects ask the same question, it updates the sales materials to answer it. “We’re building a self-learning revenue engine,” said Kareem Amin, Clay’s co-founder and chief executive. The pitch is that the system learns from what works and recommends the next step. Co-founder Varun Anand wrote on LinkedIn that this could range from a tweak to an email subject line to a change in product strategy.
Who uses it Clay says it now serves more than 17,000 customers, including 80% of the Forbes AI 50 list of private AI companies. Named customers include Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, Workday and two European businesses, ElevenLabs and Siemens. The company is also betting on a job title it coined. It calls the people who build these revenue systems “GTM engineers”, and says thousands now work under that name.
Clay is putting $1m into a scholarship fund to train more of them. It will preview new products at Sculpt, its user conference in San Francisco on 8 October. A fast climb in a crowded field The valuation has moved quickly. Tech Funding News reported that an employee tender offer in January valued Clay at $5bn, between the two rounds.
Clay has not disclosed its revenue, so the jump cannot be checked against sales. Competition is heavy. Established data providers sell into the same teams. Apollo.io bought Pocus in March to build its own AI layer.
ZoomInfo, another rival, has seen investors question whether AI will reprice its database. Startups such as 11x, which Tech Funding News describes as building autonomous “digital workers”, go further and aim to replace sales roles outright. Some observers are sceptical of the loop Clay describes. Replying to Anand’s post, Paolo Perrone, who writes about production AI, said the plan reads as “clay grading its own homework.” His point is that the same system produces the outcomes it learns from.
The round also cuts against the mood around older software. Investors have spent months arguing over whether the SaaSpocalypse is over. On Thursday, Bending Spoons agreed to buy Miro for $1.355bn. The contrast shows how differently investors now price software sold as AI agents.
Wellington typically backs companies approaching public markets, as the Times noted. Whether Clay’s agents can turn its customer list into revenue growth to match the valuation is the question an IPO would eventually answer.
