Canadian-founded, New York City-based artificial intelligence (AI) go-to-market startup Clay has nearly tripled the unicorn valuation it achieved earlier this year through a new $100-million USD ($137.4-million CAD) Series C round.
The lead investor was CapitalG, the independent growth fund of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Existing backers Sequoia Capital, Meritech Capital, First Round Capital, BoxGroup, and Boldstart also participated, as did new investor Sapphire Ventures.
Clay says it’s on track to more than triple its revenue this year as it serves more than 10,000 customers.
The round values Clay at $3.1 billion USD ($4.26 billion CAD), or six times its $500 million USD valuation from just over a year ago. It was only eight months ago that a funding round valued Clay at $1.25 billion USD, or more than twice its worth in its July 2024 Series B round. Clay has raised $204 million USD ($280 million CAD) to date.
Clay was launched in 2017 by two McGill University graduates and repeat entrepreneurs, Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan, looking to make computer programming more accessible. Rusan, who has since left the company, is Canadian, while Amin—who is originally from Egypt—came to Canada to attend McGill before moving to the United States (US). Clay hired head of operations Varun Anand in late 2021 when it began focusing on automating sales and marketing.
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Clay aims to help go-to-market teams find strong sales leads and personalize their approach rather than casting a wide generic net. The company claims its platform combines more than 150 integrations and AI agents to help teams find data, including contact information and intent signals, and instantly apply that data across a team’s entire tech stack.
Clay allows sales and marketing teams to “bring to life workflows that they could only dream of before,” CapitalG partner Jane Alexander said in a statement.
Clay says it’s on track to more than triple its revenue this year as it serves more than 10,000 customers (up from 5,000 in January), including software and AI giants like OpenAI, Canva, Anthropic, and Rippling. The company said its new funding will be used to accelerate its product development.
Feature image courtesy Clay.