Clay raises $100M to target Fortune 500 customers

Clay, the New York-based startup that automates the tedious grunt work of sales and marketing outreach, has raised $115 million in new funding as it pivots upmarket toward the Fortune 500. The round values the company at $3.1 billion, and signals where venture capital thinks the next wave of AI value gets created: inside enterprise sales pipelines. Co-founders Kareem Amin and Varun Anand built Clay around a simple but stubborn problem. Sales and marketing teams spend enormous amounts of time manually researching prospects, stitching together data from dozens of sources, and personalizing outreach at scale. Clay’s platform automates that entire chain, pulling in data, enriching it with AI, and triggering workflows that used to require a small army of SDRs. From scrappy tool to enterprise ambition Clay was founded in 2017, but shifted its focus toward go-to-market automation around 2021 and 2022. The company now counts more than 10,000 customers, a list that includes OpenAI, Anthropic, Canva, Intercom, and Rippling. Revenue has grown at a pace of multiple consecutive years of 6x to 10x growth. Clay expects to cross roughly $100 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025. ...