Clay is a go-to-market data and automation platform founded in 2017. It lets sales, marketing, and growth teams pull data from more than 130 providers into one table, enrich and research accounts and contacts with AI agents, and push the results into the rest of their stack — CRMs, email sequencers, and ad platforms — without writing code.
Clay was founded in New York by Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan, with Varun Anand joining as co-founder in 2021. Its differentiation is breadth plus flexibility: rather than selling a single proprietary database, it aggregates many data sources, lets customers bring their own APIs, and wraps them in conditional workflows and an AI research agent, Claygent. That design made integrations central to the product, and Clay now offers more than 200 of them. It popularized the "GTM engineering" framing for teams that build outbound and enrichment systems the way engineers build software. Clay's own funding page lists a $2.5 million seed led by First Round Capital (2017), a $13.5 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital (2023), a $46 million Series B at a $500 million valuation (June 2024) and a $40 million Series B expansion at $1.25 billion (January 2025), both led by Meritech Capital Partners, and tender offers at $1.5 billion (May 2025) and $5 billion (January 2026). Clay announced a $100 million Series C led by CapitalG at a $3.1 billion valuation in August 2025 and, in a September 2026 Business Wire release, a $115 million Series D led by Wellington at $7.1 billion. Its funding page puts total raised at $392 million, a figure that includes the tender offers; TechCrunch reported total funding of $204 million as of the Series C.
I joined Clay in April 2022 as a customer engineer and lead integration builder. Since then I've worked on every part of the product, led growth engineering, managed the growth team, and built more than half of those 200+ integrations. Today I'm a special technical advisor here.