Clay, a New York company that sells data and automation tools to sales and marketing teams, announced on 9 September 2026 that it had raised $115m in a Series D round at a $7.1bn valuation.
Wellington Management led the round. Sequoia Capital, StepStone Group, Andreessen Horowitz's Perennial fund, Meritech, DST Global, CapitalG, BoxGroup, Boldstart Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and Evolution Equity Partners also took part, according to the company's announcement.
The valuation is more than double the $3.1bn Clay was valued at in its $100m Series C in August 2025, which CapitalG led, according to TechCrunch. The Next Web, citing Tech Funding News, reported that an employee tender offer in January had valued the company at $5bn.
“It became increasingly evident that the opportunity for Clay is massive and transcends the traditional sales tools category.”Rob Mazzoni, technology-focused investment executive, Wellington Management
What Clay does
Clay started out, according to Tech Funding News as cited by The Next Web, as a way to make programming accessible to people who do not code. It now serves go-to-market teams, pulling data about companies and contacts from many providers and using it to run outreach.
The company said more than 17,000 teams build on Clay, among them Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, Visa and UPS, and that 80% of the companies on the Forbes AI 50 list use it. It also counts nearly 100 user-run Clay Clubs in cities from Bangalore to Lisbon.
Clay was founded in 2017 by Kareem Amin, its chief executive, and Nicolae Rusan, according to The Next Web. Varun Anand joined as a third co-founder in 2021. Its latest product push centres on agents: in its announcement the company described a self-learning revenue engine, with campaign tools across email, ads and landing pages and agents that learn from the results of those campaigns.
Who invested
The New York Times, which first reported the round, noted that Wellington typically backs companies that are approaching the public markets, according to The Next Web.
Rob Mazzoni, a technology-focused investment executive at Wellington, said the opportunity for Clay goes beyond the traditional category of sales tools, Dealroom reported. Alfred Lin, a partner at returning investor Sequoia, said Clay was changing its product to become a self-learning engine.
What the money is for
Clay did not say how it would spend the $115m. Alongside the round it launched a $1m scholarship fund for people training to become go-to-market engineers, a job title the company introduced in 2023. It said it would preview new products at its Sculpt conference on 8 October.
The company did not disclose revenue in its announcement. Dealroom reported that Amin said annualised revenue was on pace to reach about $200m in the current quarter, and that he expected around $240m by the end of the fiscal year. These figures are company statements and were not independently verified.
Company website: clay.com