Clay, the AI-powered go-to-market platform, has raised $115 million in Series D funding at a $7.1 billion valuation, in one of the latest signs that AI is moving beyond software development and into the way companies find customers and generate revenue.
The round was led by Wellington, with participation from Sequoia, StepStone, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Perennial, Meritech, DST, CapitalG, BoxGroup, Boldstart, Bloomberg Beta and Evolution.
The New York-based company now serves more than 17,000 companies, including 80% of the Forbes AI 50, alongside customers such as Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, ElevenLabs, Workday and Siemens.
From Sales Software to an AI Growth Engine
Founded in 2017 by Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan, with Varun Anand joining as a co-founder in 2021, Clay initially focused on helping B2B companies access and work with better data.
The company has since evolved into something much broader: an AI system that can understand a company’s market, identify opportunities and help execute the actions required to turn those opportunities into revenue.
Clay describes this as agentic go-to-market, where AI agents can perform tasks traditionally handled by sales, marketing and revenue operations teams.
“AI is unleashing the biggest wave of company creation in history,” said Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Clay. “Clay’s goal is to be the engine those companies use to grow to their full potential.”
Enter the GTM Engineer
One of Clay’s biggest bets is the emergence of a new role it calls the GTM Engineer.
Just as software engineers increasingly use coding agents to build applications, GTM Engineers use growth agents to build and operate revenue systems.
These agents can identify ideal customers, monitor signals such as funding events and hiring activity, launch campaigns and personalize outreach. Over time, Clay learns from the results, building a deeper understanding of a company’s customers, market and business.
The idea is to turn go-to-market from a collection of disconnected activities into a system that continuously learns and improves.
“We’re building a self-learning revenue engine,” Amin said. “The better a company gets at learning, the faster it grows.”
Turning Company Data Into Action
Clay brings together a company’s internal context, including CRM data, product usage, campaign engagement, calls and emails, and combines it with external signals such as funding announcements, hiring activity and job changes.
That information creates a continuously updated view of a company’s total addressable market.
The system can then turn a goal expressed in plain language into an executable workflow.
For example, a company could ask Clay to identify fintech marketing leaders, research their businesses, create a tailored presentation for each prospect and prepare an outreach campaign.
The system can also retain context from those interactions. If prospects repeatedly raise the same question about pricing or contract timing, Clay can identify the pattern and help update the company’s materials.
Importantly, customers retain control over how the system operates. Teams can build deterministic workflows themselves or allow AI agents to create workflows that they can subsequently inspect and modify.
Building the Next Generation of GTM Talent
Alongside the funding announcement, Clay unveiled a $1 million scholarship fund aimed at training the next generation of GTM Engineers.
The company believes the role will attract people from a range of backgrounds, including RevOps, growth marketing, software engineering and design.
The scholarship initiative reflects a broader belief behind Clay’s product strategy: AI may not simply replace existing go-to-market roles. It could create entirely new categories of professionals who combine technical thinking with sales, marketing and growth expertise.
“We believe the next wave of companies will be built by teams that think about growth in a systematic way,” Amin said.
A $7.1B Bet on AI-Powered Growth
Clay’s latest financing gives the company significant capital to expand a platform that is already being used by thousands of businesses, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
The timing is notable. As AI reduces the cost and time required to build software, the bottleneck for many companies may increasingly shift toward finding customers, understanding markets and scaling distribution.
Clay is betting that those activities can become increasingly automated, personalized and self-improving.
With 17,000+ customers and a $7.1 billion valuation, investors are effectively betting that go-to-market could become the next major software category transformed by AI.
And Clay’s ambition goes beyond building another sales tool. It wants to build the revenue engine that learns alongside the company it serves.
