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How to find a company's founders
Describe the market where founders work
Add your target market or industry, say SaaS, fintech, or e-commerce. Sculptor searches Clay's people database for Founders and Co-Founders matching your criteria.
Sculptor sources and enriches each founder row
Sculptor scans Clay's B2B contact data for Founders and Co-Founders in your target industry, then waterfalls through 150+ providers to surface a verified work email. Only rows where a match is found include an email.
Get founder names, companies, and verified emails
The finished table has company name and verified Founder email for matched rows. Push to Smartlead, Instantly, or your sequencer to trigger a campaign the moment a row lands.
Why Clay for finding a company's founders
Founder title matching across Clay's people database
Surface Founders and Co-Founders by filtering Clay's people database on job title, industry, company size, and current role duration. Broad, exact, and phrase-match title modes reduce noise so matched rows reflect genuine founding-team contacts.
150+ provider waterfall for verified founder emails
Get a verified work email for matched founder rows. Clay waterfalls through 150+ providers in sequence and only charges credits when one returns a hit, pushing coverage well beyond any single source.
Catch-all flagging before emails leave Clay
Every verified founder row runs through email validation before it hits your sequencer, flagging catch-all and undeliverable addresses so your bounces stay low and your sender reputation stays intact.
One-click push to Salesloft, Outreach, or Smartlead
Send your enriched founder list directly to Salesloft, Outreach, Smartlead, or Instantly with a native integration, no CSV exports or manual field mapping needed, so campaigns start in minutes.
Our most successful campaigns are built on data that doesn’t exist in off-the-shelf tools. Clay helps us find those signals — and transform ambitious ideas into executable, high-performing campaigns.
Frequently asked questions
How does Sculptor find a company's founders?
Sculptor uses Clay's Find People source, filtering by the job title "Founder" along with your target industry or company list. Clay automatically expands the search to synonyms like Co-Founder and CEO, so you capture founders who use alternate titles. It then runs a waterfall across 11 email providers, including Hunter, Findymail, and Prospeo, to return a verified work email for each founder.
How accurate are the founder emails Clay finds?
Clay's waterfall enrichment typically lifts email coverage from around 30% with a single provider to 80% or higher across the full list. In Clay's own testing, top providers like Datagma scored above 97% confidence on SMB contacts, and the waterfall stops at the first verified hit, so you only spend credits on confirmed matches. Founder emails at smaller companies tend to have the highest match rates.
Can I find founders for a whole list of companies at once?
Yes. Paste a list of companies, upload a CSV, or pipe data from an existing Clay table, and Sculptor builds a row per founder for every company in one run. Once the table populates, push the entire list to HubSpot or Salesforce with a single click, or export as a CSV for your preferred outreach tool.
Is it legal to cold email founders I find through Clay?
In the U.S., CAN-SPAM permits B2B cold email as long as you include a clear opt-out link, a valid physical address, and accurate sender information. In the EU, GDPR allows B2B outreach under a documented legitimate interest basis (Article 6(1)(f)), but you must honor opt-out requests promptly and be transparent about how you use personal data.
Regulations vary by country and industry, so always check the rules for your jurisdiction before launching outreach.