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Funding Details
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Company | Clay (New York, USA) |
| Round | Series D |
| Amount | $115M |
| Lead investor | Wellington Management |
| Follow-on | Sequoia Capital, StepStone, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z Perennial), Meritech, DST Global, CapitalG, BoxGroup, Boldstart, Bloomberg Beta, Evolution Equity Partners |
| Valuation | $7.1B (up from $3.1B at its Series C in August 2025, more than 2x in 13 months; up ~42% from a $5B employee tender in January 2026) |
| Total raised | At least $392M (at least $277M disclosed before this round, plus $115M now) |
| Founded | 2017 |
| Headcount | About 1,000 (2026, per LATKA; up from 299 in June 2024) |
What the company does
Clay builds an AI-driven "GTM Engine" — it's not a CRM, and not a sales engagement tool. It's the layer underneath both, the platform that lets AI agents find the right customer, understand why that customer should buy, and take the first step in the relationship.
Its core product gives businesses "growth agents" — AI systems that identify a company's ideal customers, monitor intent signals like funding events, hiring activity, and job changes, then launch personalized campaigns automatically. The company coined the term "GTM Engineer," drawing an explicit parallel to how a software engineer delegates implementation to a coding agent: a GTM Engineer delegates prospecting and outreach to a Clay growth agent. The technical differentiator is its Waterfall feature, which automatically scans multiple external databases in sequence to enrich lead data — replacing the old workflow of a salesperson manually searching each source, and giving agents clean data to act on.
Clay now serves more than 17,000 customers, including Anthropic (which uses it to research leads), Airbnb (finding hosts for its Experiences business), and DoorDash (identifying companies for its employee lunch program). ARR crossed $100M in December 2025, and at the time of this round CEO Kareem Amin said annualized revenue was already approaching $200M for the quarter, with a target of roughly $240M by fiscal year-end — the company was briefly profitable this year.
What this round signals
What it means for the agent ecosystem
Wellington Management leading this round matters more than the dollar figure. Wellington isn't a traditional VC — it's an asset manager with roughly $1.4 trillion under management, and its decision to lead signals that AI-driven GTM infrastructure is seen as a durable enterprise software category rather than a passing trend. CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund) also participated, and Google is simultaneously a Clay investor and a Clay customer — that overlap between strategic investment and product usage is the strongest validation signal in the round.
What investors are betting on
Sequoia has backed Clay since its 2019 Series A and continued piling in here, consistent with its usual playbook in vertical AI (including Harvey and Cognition) of betting early on people and adding capital as growth compounds. What's notable is the switch to Wellington — a type of asset manager that typically backs companies it expects to go public within a few years. Amin says there's no imminent IPO plan, but he and co-founder Varun Anand are reportedly running the company with the discipline of one anyway.
Numbers worth watching
- Valuation trajectory: $3.1B (Series C, Aug 2025) → $5B (employee tender, Jan 2026) → $7.1B (this round, Sep 2026) — more than 2.3x in 13 months
- ARR crossed $100M in December 2025 and is now approaching $200M annualized — nearly doubling in 9 months
- Over 17,000 customers, including two frontier AI labs, Anthropic and Google — a signal that the buyers who understand AI best are also running their own GTM on Clay's agents
Watchlist status
Clay is already tracked in watchlist section D2 (Sales / GTM). Tracking focus updated to: $115M Series D, $7.1B valuation, led by Wellington Management, and the company's own coined term "GTM Engineer" defining the human role that operates its agents.
Today's takeaway
The most memorable part of this round isn't the amount — it's who's leading it. Not a VC fund, but an asset manager that oversees $1.4 trillion. When a company building "AI agents that find your customers" attracts the kind of institutional capital that usually only backs pre-IPO companies, it signals Wall Street now treats "AI-agent-automated GTM" as a predictable, scalable category to bet on — not an experimental technology still waiting to be validated.
References
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