Clay raises $62M at a $500M valuation to turn any growth idea into reality

Author
Authors
Kareem Amin
&
Date
Jun 27, 2024

TL;DR: Clay has raised a $46M Series B at a $500M valuation from Meritech Capital with participation from Sequoia, First Round, Box Group, Boldstart, and some of the world’s top sales and marketing leaders to power growth for tech’s biggest names like Anthropic, Intercom, Notion and 2500+ others. This is in addition to our previously unannounced $13.5M Series A, led by Sequoia, $2.5M seed led by First Round, and pre-seed from Box Group.

Growth is the lifeblood of any business. The best way for B2B businesses to grow is to find customers who want their products. That requires deep customer research which, historically, demanded the luxury of time, money, and headcount.

The best companies take the time to deeply research prospects before sending creative, relevant and personalized outreach. Many companies, however, lack the resources to do so, and resort to large-scale, generic, and unfortunately spammy outreach instead.

We built Clay to make it easy for businesses of all kinds to grow by finding and reaching customers who care about them—without huge investments in tooling or manual labor.

Clay is the orchestration platform for modern go-to-market teams.

Great outreach starts with customer research: you need to know who to target and why. Traditionally, customer research has been expensive and manual. Growth teams typically buy incomplete, point-in-time databases with information like employee count or fundraising stage. These databases often have incomplete coverage of the information companies need, forcing them to buy and combine these data sets manually.

Next, companies employ Sales Development Reps (SDRs) to scour the web to enrich that data with bespoke information (e.g., is the company SOC II compliant? When was the founder last mentioned in the news?). 

Finally, those SDRs manually write personalized messages to each prospect: a process that can take hours each day for just a few qualified leads.

Clay integrates this entire motion into a single, easy-to-use platform.

Customers can use Clay to query and combine over 75 data enrichment providers. They’ve seen this triple both coverage and accuracy in the wild.

For truly bespoke research tasks, customers can use our AI research agent to fill in the gaps. For example, you can ask Claygent to infer a company’s competitors, check how many pricing plans it offers, filter for SOC-II compliance, and more.

Once the data foundation is complete, customers can use our AI message writing feature to craft highly relevant, personalized messages to each prospect.

Clay enables creativity at scale

With Clay, a single person can now run campaigns—whether outbound, inbound, expansion, or retention—that previously required coordinating the entire GTM team.

We decided to build a more powerful tool that targets technical users like growth marketers and rev-ops because this enables customers to centralize and manage all of their GTM workflows and experiments in one place. 

This means companies can send fewer, better messages—and only to people who are a good mutual fit. And sales representatives can focus on nurturing customer relationships and closing deals.

The end result is that companies grow faster when they use Clay. By combining data aggregation, customer research and messaging in a single coherent platform, creative GTM teams are able to dramatically scale their outreach.

Thank you to the Clay community

Thanks to the Clay community, we have grown 10x YoY for the past two years – almost entirely through word-of-mouth. We are incredibly grateful to have become the tool of choice for both small agencies and large scale-ups like Notion, Anthropic and Verkada.

This is the first time we have announced any of our funding. I’m proud of the progress the team has made and the community we’ve built. I’m excited to have the resources to scale the platform even further.

Clay first launched on Product Hunt in February 2022 with a team of under ten, and we now have over 50 employees, 100k users, and 2500+ customers. Customers are using Clay to drastically increase data coverage, perform better, more efficient research, and generate higher quality, more personalized messaging — boosting outbound campaign response rates by 2-3x. 

I’m particularly excited about the ecosystem that has emerged around us. More than 11k people exchange ideas and provide feedback in our Slack community. There are dozens of Claygencies (agencies that specialize in Clay), some of which have multi-million dollar run rates. Grassroot bootcamps and newsletters are teaching people how to grow their companies with Clay.

Our goal is to help people grow their business. We learn from our customers’ creativity and do our best to ensure Clay is the easiest way to implement those ideas. Our product is fun and flexible, and our culture is as well. Our team includes some of the world’s most talented engineers, ex-founders, and operators, but we don’t just write code — we make music, perform DJ sets, write poetry, make pottery (of course), and so much more.

We’d love for you to try it—either for free or via an enterprise demo. And we’d love for you to come join us — we’re hiring across every function!

Kareem

I wanted to acknowledge a deep appreciation for all our investors and partners. Special thanks to David Tisch, Adam Rothenberg, Greg Rosen (BoxGroup) and Andy Sack for supporting us even before we finalized what we were building. And to Phin Barnes (First Round) for partnering with us at the earliest stages. We’re deeply grateful to our board member Mike Vernal (Sequoia) who has been an essential support in the journey to product-market fit—we couldn’t have done it without him. We also want to thank Brett Berson for his advice, check-ins and infectious optimism. Andre Charoo (Maple VC) has been cheering us on from day one, and been very helpful on so many fronts. Eliot Durbin and Ed Sim (Boldstart) have shown us unwavering enthusiasm and support from day one. Thanks to Josh Kopelman (First Round) and Alfred Lin, Pat Grady, and Andrew Reed (Sequoia) for continuing to support us as we grow the company in this next stage. Finally, we’re excited for our new partnership with Alex Kurland and the Meritech team!

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