Clay Sculpt 2026: its first SDR Agent is built for inbound. At Sculpt 2026 in San Francisco on 8 October, Clay previewed an Inbound SDR Agent that qualifies inbound leads in a voice conversation and demos the product, with a waitlist for pre-beta partners. It came a month after Clay's $115M Series D at a $7.1B valuation, led by Wellington. Its advice for a 1 to 5 person team: answer inbound leads faster before you automate cold outreach. Danish Khan8 min readPublished 20 October 2026 What did Clay announce at Sculpt 2026? Clay's recap of Sculpt 2026, its second annual user conference, held in San Francisco on 8 October 2026, covers three announcements: an agent-first way to build in Clay, Clay Workflows, and a preview of an Inbound SDR Agent. Clay's Sculpt recap says 2,000 attendees from 30 countries came. Of the three, only Workflows was available to all Clay users on the day, as a beta. | Announcement | What it does, as Clay describes it | Status in Clay's recap (8 Oct 2026) | | Agent-first way to build | You give Clay an outcome, such as finding contacts at high-intent companies and building a campaign. It plans the work from your ICP and positioning in Knowledge Hub, sources contacts, picks signals and drafts a sequence for you to review. Available to Sculpt attendees on the day; Clay said it would roll out to users in its early access programme in the coming weeks | | Workflows | A visual canvas for plays, where each step can branch, loop, run code or call an agent. You can describe a play in plain language, and results write back to Clay's Audiences data layer. In beta for all Clay users and launching this autumn. Clay announced the open beta on 11 August 2026. | | Inbound SDR Agent | Qualifies inbound leads in a voice conversation, demos your product in a sandbox with a use case that fits each lead, and learns how to demo from your best sellers' call recordings. Preview only. Clay is signing up pre-beta partners through a waitlist. | Clay calls the Inbound SDR Agent its first agentic seller. Its product page, checked on 20 October 2026, adds that the agent enriches website visitors in real time, routes qualified leads to the right rep and books meetings. The page shows a waitlist form and no price, and its FAQ says the product ships in phases starting in autumn 2026. How much did Clay raise in its Series D? Clay raised $115 million in a Series D at a $7.1 billion valuation, announced on 9 September 2026. Wellington led the round, with participation from Sequoia, StepStone, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Perennial, Meritech, DST, CapitalG, BoxGroup, Boldstart, Bloomberg Beta and Evolution, according to Clay's announcement and its press release on Business Wire. Clay also gave its own growth figures, which are company-reported: 4x revenue growth in 2025 and more than 17,000 customers, including 80% of the Forbes AI 50. The same release announced a $1 million scholarship fund to train GTM engineers, the people who build revenue systems inside companies. Kareem Amin, Clay's co-founder and CEO, said in the funding press release: "Now we're building agents that can help grow your company for you." Sculpt, a month later, was where Clay previewed what it calls its first agentic seller. Why is Clay's first SDR agent aimed at inbound? Clay's recap pitches it on coverage. It says the Inbound SDR Agent will engage and convert every lead in the inbound funnel, including the ones reps don't have time to work, and that Clay already powers inbound enrichment, routing and replies for hundreds of companies. The product page also pitches speed. One section is headed "Increase speed to lead with more booked meetings", and it says leads who arrive outside SDR hours get an instant demo. Clay also says it expects companies that run both a product-led and a sales-led motion to see higher conversion from self-serve leads after a tailored demo. The recap presents that as an expectation for a product still in preview. Clay already sells cold outbound. On 1 September 2026 it announced that its Sequencer, which it describes as end-to-end cold outbound in one place, was generally available on its Launch, Growth and Enterprise plans. Its first selling agent, though, is aimed at leads that are already waiting. Its reading: an inbound lead has already chosen to talk to you, and a cold prospect has not. When a company with more than 17,000 customers by its own count builds its first selling agent for inbound, SIELA take that as a hint about where pipeline is easiest to lose. Should a small team fix inbound before automating cold outreach? For most teams of 1 to 5 people, yes. This is its advice, and SIELA is not citing a study for it. Four reasons: * You have already paid for inbound leads. Ads, content, events and referrals cost money or time. A slow reply wastes spend you have made, while cold outreach asks for new spend on lists, data and sending. * The fix is small. A booking link, an alert and a reply rule take an afternoon. A cold programme needs a target list, verified emails, sending setup and copy testing. * Inbound tells you what to say cold. The questions inbound leads ask show which problems and words land. Clay's agent is built on a similar idea: the recap says its conversations feed recommendations on ICP, positioning and competitive differentiation. * Cold email carries sending risk. Google's email sender guidelines ask senders to keep the spam rate in Postmaster Tools below 0.10% and never reach 0.30%. Google adds that people who want your messages are less likely to report them as spam. Someone who filled in your form has asked to hear from you. Cold comes first in one case: when inbound is close to zero. With nothing to speed up, outbound is how you find your first conversations. Even then, set up the booking link and alerts below, because replies to cold outreach become inbound conversations too. How can a 1 to 5 person team fix speed-to-lead this week? Measure your current reply time, remove the wait for ready buyers, and set a target you check weekly. Six steps, about three hours in total: * Measure your reply time Export your last 30 inbound leads: demo requests, contact forms, trial sign-ups. For each, note when it arrived and when a person first replied. Write down the median and how many got a reply the same working day. Monday, about 1 hour * Put a booking link where the lead lands Add it to the form's thank-you page and the automatic confirmation email, so a buyer who is ready can book without waiting for you. Siela's built-in booking pages check every connected calendar and send reminders; any booking tool that reads your real calendar will do. Tuesday, 30 minutes * Send alerts to where you work Route new-lead notifications to your phone or team chat, and name one owner per day. On a team of three, rotate the owner so nobody assumes someone else replied. One owner a day * Ask two questions on the form Team size and what they want to solve are enough to write a specific first reply and to spot poor fits. Keep the rest of the form short. 15 minutes * Write three replies in advance Good fit: thank them, answer their question in two lines, share the booking link. Unclear fit: ask one question. Poor fit: point them to a guide or a partner. Its meeting request email templates are a starting point. Wednesday, 45 minutes * Set a target and check it every Friday Pick a reply-time target you can keep during working hours, such as within one hour, and compare each week's median with Monday's number. Also count how many inbound leads booked a call. Fridays, 10 minutes When should you add cold outbound, and in what order? Add cold volume once you hit your inbound reply target most weeks. Here is the order SIELA suggest, from cheapest to most involved: * Instant acknowledgement and a booking link. No AI needed, and it covers buyers who are ready now. * Enrichment and routing. Each lead reaches the right person with company context attached. The recap lists enriching and routing inbound leads as a use for Clay Workflows. * AI qualification of inbound. Worth it once inbound volume outgrows the people answering it. Clay's Inbound SDR Agent is one to watch; on 20 October 2026 it was still a preview with a waitlist, which Clay says ships in phases starting in autumn 2026. * Cold outreach aimed at buying signals. Funding, hiring and people asking how to solve your problem give you a reason to write. Its guide to buying signals for small teams lists the ones worth tracking. When you reach step four, start with fewer, better-fit people. Siela's AI SDR, for example, scores every lead hot, warm or cold with a one-line reason, and in its default High Intent mode it contacts only leads scored hot. Whatever tool you use, keep the inbound reply target on your Friday check so new cold volume doesn't slow your replies to people who asked first. Frequently asked questions. When will Clay's Inbound SDR Agent be available? Clay has not given an exact date. Its Sculpt recap, published on 8 October 2026, describes the Inbound SDR Agent as a preview and invites companies to join a waitlist as pre-beta partners. Clay's Inbound SDR product page, checked 20 October 2026, says the product ships in phases starting in autumn 2026, and shows a waitlist form and no price. What is Clay Workflows? Who led Clay's Series D, and at what valuation? How does Clay's Inbound SDR Agent qualify leads? How do I measure speed-to-lead on a small team? Sources.

Clay Sculpt 2026: everything announced and what it means. C By Charles Summers · Oct 9, 2026, 9:28:09 AM Clay announced three things at its Sculpt conference in San Francisco on October 8, 2026: an agent-first way to build campaigns in Clay, a visual builder called Clay Workflows that is in beta for all users right now, and an Inbound SDR Agent that is preview-only behind a waitlist. No pricing was announced for any of the three. Here is what each one actually does, who can use it today, and what it changes for your GTM stack. What did Clay announce at Sculpt 2026? Sculpt was Clay's first big conference, held October 8 in San Francisco with about 2,000 attendees from 30 countries. Three product announcements came out of it, each at a different stage of readiness: | Announcement | What it is | Who gets it now | | Agent-first building | An agent plans, runs, and improves plays from an outcome you describe | Sculpt attendees today, early access users in the coming weeks | | Clay Workflows | A visual canvas where steps branch, loop, run code, or call an agent | Beta for all Clay users now, full launch this fall | | Inbound SDR Agent | Voice agent that qualifies inbound leads and demos your product in a sandbox | Preview only, waitlist for pre-beta partners | What is the agent-first way to build in Clay? Instead of assembling tables, formulas, and enrichment columns by hand, you describe the outcome you want and an agent plans the play, runs it, and keeps improving it. It pulls context from Knowledge Hub, which holds your ICP, buyer personas, and positioning, learns from campaign results, suggests ICP changes, and can even schedule itself to check back on performance. This is the same direction the whole category is sprinting. Apollo shipped its AI GTM system last week, and ZoomInfo bought DoubleO.ai to build Agent Teams. The spreadsheet-with-superpowers era of Apollo, ZoomInfo, and Clay is turning into a prompt box with a quota. The practical takeaway: your edge shifts from knowing the tool to having clean ICP docs, positioning, and data the agent can actually use. What are Clay Workflows, and can you use them today? Yes. Clay Workflows is in beta for all Clay users now, with a full launch planned for this fall. It is a visual canvas for complex plays where steps can branch, loop, run code, or call an agent. You can build workflows in natural language or through a coding agent's CLI, trace runs record by record, fix a problem and re-run it in bulk, and write results back to Audiences. Its advice: opt in now, but test on one contained play, not your main pipeline. Workflow runs touch live records, and a loop that misfires at Clay scale is expensive to clean up. If you want help designing agent workflows that do not blow up your CRM, that is literally what its workflow agents build does. | Agents are coming for every tool in your stack Hacking Demand LLC publish the first practical analysis of launches like this, usually within 24 hours. Grab the free AI Readiness Scorecard and get the next one before your feed finds it. Get the scorecard | What is Clay's Inbound SDR Agent? It is the most ambitious of the three and the furthest from your hands. The Inbound SDR Agent qualifies inbound leads through a voice conversation, then demos your product in a sandbox matched to each lead's use case. It learns from your best sellers' call recordings and recommends changes to your ICP, positioning, or competitive story based on what it hears. It is preview only. Companies can join a waitlist to become pre-beta partners, and Clay has published no timeline or pricing. That puts Clay squarely in the AI SDR lane, which until now belonged to the sales engagement vendors. If you are evaluating AI SDRs this quarter, start with what already exists and works: its AI SDR prospecting engine walks through the stack Hacking Demand LLC deploy for clients. What should Clay users do right now? Three moves. First, turn on the Workflows beta and rebuild one existing play as a workflow, so your team learns the model before the full launch. Second, only join the Inbound SDR waitlist if you have call recordings and documented positioning for it to learn from, because an agent trained on nothing produces nothing. Third, watch your credits. Clay announced no pricing for any of this, and agent runs consume credits in ways that are hard to predict, so pilot with hard caps. Context worth knowing: Clay raised a $115 million Series D at a $7.1 billion valuation in September. Agent features are how that valuation gets justified, which means they will be pushed hard. Adopt on your schedule, not theirs. If you want a second opinion on where agents fit in your stack, talk to an expert. Frequently asked questions When and where was Clay Sculpt 2026? October 8, 2026, in San Francisco, with about 2,000 attendees from 30 countries. It was Clay's first Sculpt conference. Is Clay Workflows available now? Yes, in beta for all Clay users, with a full launch planned for fall 2026. You can build workflows visually, in natural language, or through a coding agent's CLI. How do I get access to Clay's Inbound SDR Agent? You cannot use it yet. It is in preview, and companies can join a waitlist to become pre-beta partners. No launch date or pricing has been announced. Did Clay announce new pricing at Sculpt 2026? No. None of the three announcements came with pricing. Since Clay runs on credits, assume agent and workflow runs will consume them and set caps during any pilot. Sources: Clay, Sculpt 2026 recap (October 8, 2026); Dealroom, Clay Series D. Charles Summers Founder of Hacking Demand. 12+ years building B2B demand generation, including 330+ B2B and B2C webinars produced. Keep building demand. Want Hacking Demand LLC to build your demand engine? Done-for-you webinars, AI agents, and pipeline plays, live in days.

G2 and Clay bring trusted insights into GTM workflows. October 9, 2026 Table of Contents Most sales and marketing teams know which accounts fit their ideal customer profile (ICP). But few can tell you which of those accounts are actually in-market right now. That's the difference between an account that simply fits and one that warrants attention today. And G2 and Clay are closing that gap. Put G2 insights to work inside Clay G2 has partnered with Clay to bring its insights - including reviews, category taxonomy, market intelligence, and Market Signals - into Clay. Clay, the infrastructure that fast-growing go-to-market (GTM) teams already use to build their revenue system, unifies a company's customer and market data from more than 200 third-party sources, then deploys GTM agents to research, prioritize, and act on the accounts that matter. With this partnership, G2's trusted, first-party buyer insights are now available directly inside Clay - no separate G2 subscription required. On G2, buyers research categories, compare products, and validate decisions on their own terms, generating real evidence of where demand is building long before a rep ever gets involved. Clay users can now access that evidence directly inside Clay, so their teams can act on it instead of discovering it after the fact. What G2 data is now available in Clay G2 insights - including verified reviews, category taxonomy, market intelligence, and Market Signals - are now available inside Clay, with no separate setup or connector required. Clay users can access G2 data directly within Clay using Clay credits, with no G2 subscription needed. Market Signals identifies which companies are actively researching solutions in a specified software category, giving teams a way to separate accounts that simply fit their ICP from those showing real, active buying interest right now. Teams with an active G2 Buyer Intent subscription can also bring their own data directly into Clay at no additional cost. Where Market Signals tells you which accounts are in market, Buyer Intent goes further, surfacing the behavioral detail behind that signal, including what products they're evaluating, which competitors they're researching, and how far along they are in their buying journey. Together, the partnership lets teams: * Find the accounts that matter now, using G2 intelligence to separate accounts that simply fit their ICP from those showing real, active buying interest. * Build G2 intelligence directly into existing Clay workflows for enrichment, segmentation, and prioritization, without switching tools or adding steps. * Act on buyer interest as it emerges, automating the plays that turn genuine in-market activity into pipeline before the window closes. "G2 shows where buyers do their research, and Clay is where GTM teams orchestrate and act on it. In Clay, teams can combine G2's buyer insights with data from more than 200 providers in our data marketplace, then reach the right person at an in-market account while the interest is still fresh." Gillian James Head of Data Partnerships, Clay Get started with the G2 x Clay integration today This partnership gives GTM teams something they haven't had before: G2's trusted, first-party buyer signal built directly into the system they already use to act on it, offering an easier way to activate G2 data inside Clay. As Clay's community continues to grow, the combination of G2's marketplace intelligence and Clay's orchestration gives teams a real edge and the ability to act on genuine buyer interest before the window closes. Learn more about the partnership and how to get started here. Christine Li serves as the VP of Partnerships & Enablement at G2, bringing over 15 years of deep sales and marketing experience steering innovative B2B tech companies like LinkedIn and Bell Canada through transformative growth. Christine is also a passionate advocate for human rights and social justice, having co-founded a non-profit aimed at connecting youth to politics and leading a landmark campaign to redress the Chinese Head Tax in Canada. At home, she's embarking on her biggest role yet as mom to a toddler.