Clay is a 📝data enrichment and outbound automation platform founded in 2017 by Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan. It aggregates more than 100 data providers into a single spreadsheet-style interface, layers AI research agents on top, and lets revenue teams build, enrich, and action lists without stitching tools together. The product sits at the center of the modern 📝GTM Engineering stack, serving sales, marketing, and operations teams that run programmatic outbound and account research.
Clay started as a tool to make building software as intuitive as molding clay, then found its wedge in 📝Go-to-Market (GTM) data work, where its 📝waterfall enrichment and Claygent AI research agent became the default substrate for outbound operators. Growth tracked the rise of AI-assisted prospecting: the company reached roughly $100M ARR and a $3.1B valuation in 2025 on a $100M Series C led by CapitalG, Alphabet's growth fund, with prior backing from Meritech, Sequoia, and others. Its competitive position rests less on any single data source than on being the orchestration layer where data, AI, and workflow converge.
Clay is the tool I point to first when someone asks what GTM engineering actually looks like in practice. Single product, but it doubles as the whole category's reference implementation.