Growth Strategist - Enterprise, Customer Success

Clay hits $7.1B valuation with $115M raise as it sees AI agents running future of sales. September 10, 2026 * Clay raised $115M in a Series D led by Wellington Management, hitting a $7.1B valuation. * The go-to-market platform now serves more than 17,000 customers, including Anthropic and Google. * Clay is launching a $1M fund to train 'GTM engineers', a title it coined for the role. Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan did not set out to build a sales tool. In 2017, the pair, who met at McGill University and worked together at Microsoft, wanted to make programming accessible to people who could not code. Eight years, several pivots and one much sharper use case later, that idea is worth $7.1 billion. Clay, the New York-based go-to-market platform, has raised $115 million in Series D funding led by Wellington Management, with existing backers Sequoia Capital, StepStone, Andreessen Horowitz, Perennial, Meritech, DST, CapitalG, BoxGroup, Boldstart, Bloomberg Beta and Evolution Equity Partners all returning. The valuation marks a rapid re-rating: Clay closed its $100 million Series C at $3.1 billion just over a year ago, then saw a $5 billion employee tender offer in January before this round more than doubled that mark again. "AI is unleashing the biggest wave of company creation in history, and Clay's goal is to be the engine those companies use to grow to their full potential. We started by aggregating the best data for B2B companies. Then we built the infrastructure to run any personalised campaign on top of it. Now we're building agents that can help grow your company for you," said Amin, co-founder and chief executive. From spreadsheets to a "self-learning revenue engine" Clay's platform pulls together CRM records, product usage, campaign engagement, calls and emails, then layers in external signals such as funding announcements and hiring activity. AI agents use that combined picture to decide what a sales team should do next. For example, a team could ask Clay to identify fintech marketing leaders, research their companies, draft personalised outreach and launch it, with the system adjusting future campaigns based on what worked. Nicolae Rusan co-founded the company alongside Amin, and Varun Anand joined as a third co-founder in 2021 as Clay pivoted from a general-purpose data tool toward go-to-market teams specifically. Amin, who was born in Egypt and raised in a community of expat hospital workers in Saudi Arabia before studying electrical engineering in Canada, has described the shift as building "an integrated development environment" for revenue teams rather than another point solution. A crowded and increasingly well-funded field. Regie.ai raised a $30 million Series B in February, taking its total past $50 million.11x, which builds fully autonomous "digital workers" rather than a workflow layer, has raised roughly $76 million since its Benchmark-led Series A. Established data providers Apollo.io and ZoomInfo remain in the mix too, though Clay argues its bet is broader than any single sales role: it wants to be the infrastructure underneath the whole go-to-market function, not a replacement for one job title. The category itself is growing fast enough to support several large bets at once. The global AI-in-sales market was worth an estimated $50.8 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $383 billion by 2034, according to Global Market Insights, a pace that helps explain why investors are willing to underwrite a valuation that has more than doubled twice in thirteen months without a matching public revenue disclosure. Alongside the raise, Clay is putting $1 million into training people for the go-to-market engineer role it popularised. "We believe the next wave of companies will be built by teams that think about growth in a systematic way. We want to make this career accessible to more people," Amin concluded. If Clay's agents really can decide what a company should do next and then do it, the harder question is what happens to the sales and marketing hires that job used to belong to, and whether Wellington's late-stage, public-markets pedigree signals investors are now pricing AI-native GTM software for an IPO.

Clay lands $115-million USD Series D at $7-billion valuation. Canadian-founded go-to-market startup wants to become "the AI growth engine for every company." Canadian-founded, New York City-based go-to-market (GTM) startup Clay has closed another major financing, securing a $115-million USD ($159 million CAD) Series D round. The news: Clay develops and sells AI software and agents designed to help other firms automate marketing, sales, and other GTM tasks. The company announced its Series D on Wednesday. It was led by Wellington, with support from Andreessen Horowitz, CapitalG, Meritech, Sequoia, and others. The round values Clay at $7.1 billion USD, more than double the $3.1-billion USD valuation it was given with its $100-million Series C in August 2025. It comes as Clay surpasses 17,000 clients, up from 10,000 a year ago, including Anthropic, ElevenLabs, Google, OpenAI, Siemens, and Stripe. From the source: "AI is unleashing the biggest wave of company creation in history, and Clay's goal is to be the engine those companies use to grow to their full potential," Clay co-founder and CEO Kareem Amin said in a release. "We started by aggregating the best data for [business-to-business] companies. Then, we built the infrastructure to run any personalized campaign on top of it. Now, we're building agents that can help grow your company for you." The context: Clay was launched in 2017 by McGill University graduates and repeat entrepreneurs Amin and Nicolae Rusan. Rusan (who is Canadian) has since left Clay. Amin, who is originally from Egypt, attended McGill before moving to the United States over a decade ago. There, he built a New York startup with Rusan called Frame, an e-commerce tech firm they sold to Sailthru in 2012. Clay, which also counts Canadian-founded Maple VC among its early investors, was recently featured on VC Antoine Nivard's Dominion List, which tracks influential Canadian founders building in the US. Final thought: Clay has invested heavily in developing "a self-learning revenue engine" featuring agents capable of autonomously finding prospective clients, monitoring their intent, drafting personalized outreach, and updating customer relationship management systems. "Just as [large language models] predict the next best word in a sentence, Clay will predict the next best action to grow your business," Maple VC general partner Andre Charoo told BetaKit. Charoo added that he thinks Clay has the potential to become the agentic successor to Salesforce. Feature image courtesy Clay. OVHcloud: Your cloud. Your rules. Imagine a cloud that gives you the freedom to grow your way - open, sovereign, and free from lock-in.

Clay raises $115M to be the AI growth engine for every company. Wellington leads Series D at a $7.1B valuation for Clay, now used by 17,000+ companies; Clay also announces $1 million scholarship fund to train GTM engineers. NEW YORK - Clay, the AI go-to-market company, today announced a $115 million Series D financing at a $7.1 billion valuation, led by Wellington, with participation from Sequoia, StepStone,... September 9, 2026 at 11:55 a.m. Wellington leads Series D at a $7.1B valuation for Clay, now used by 17,000+ companies; Clay also announces $1 million scholarship fund to train GTM engineers. NEW YORK - Clay, the AI go-to-market company, today announced a $115 million Series D financing at a $7.1 billion valuation, led by Wellington, with participation from Sequoia, StepStone, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Perennial, Meritech, DST, CapitalG, BoxGroup, Boldstart, Bloomberg Beta, and Evolution. Clay now serves more than 17,000 customers, including 80% of the Forbes AI 50, as well as Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, ElevenLabs, Workday, and Siemens. "AI is unleashing the biggest wave of company creation in history, and Clay's goal is to be the engine those companies use to grow to their full potential," said Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Clay. "We started by aggregating the best data for B2B companies. Then we built the infrastructure to run any personalized campaign on top of it. Now we're building agents that can help grow your company for you." Clay predicts the next best action for a business and then helps teams take it. Just as software engineers run coding agents, GTM Engineers - coined by Clay - run growth agents. These agents can help find a company's ideal customers, monitor intent signals, launch new features to the right customers, and more. As they run, Clay comes to understand a company's business, market, and customers. It learns from outcomes and improves with use. "We're building a self-learning revenue engine," Amin said. "The better a company gets at learning, the faster it grows." The GTM system that learns from every run Clay unifies a company's full context: CRM data, product usage, campaign engagement, calls, emails, and more. It layers on signals from the outside world, like funding events, hiring activity, and job changes. From all of it, Clay builds a live understanding of a company's total addressable market and shares it across the entire organization. With that context, teams can describe a business goal in plain language, and Clay will build it into a workflow they can inspect and adjust. Customers can ask Clay to book meetings with fintech marketing leaders, for example, and it will find the right people, research their businesses, build a tailored presentation for each prospect, and set up outreach. If a prospect later mentions when their contract ends and asks for a pricing clarification, Clay will remember the timing, notice that other prospects had the same question, and update materials to answer it. Teams retain full control, whether they create deterministic workflows themselves or let AI agents build them. Clay will preview upcoming product launches at Sculpt, its second annual user conference, on October 8 in San Francisco. Announcing $1M to grow the next wave of GTM Engineers Clay also announced a $1 million scholarship fund to train the next generation of GTM engineers, the practitioners who build revenue systems at some of the fastest-growing companies in the world. People come to GTM engineering from backgrounds including RevOps, growth marketing, software engineering, and design. "We believe the next wave of companies will be built by teams that think about growth in a systematic way," Amin said. "We want to make this career accessible to more people. If we do it right, we'll be powering the next wave of the world's economic growth." About Clay Clay is the AI go-to-market company used by more than 17,000 companies, from startups to the Fortune 500, to grow to their full potential. Founded in 2017 by Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan and joined by co-founder Varun Anand in 2021, Clay is headquartered in New York. Learn more at clay.com.