Companies have two fundamental responsibilities: building and selling. And GTM has changed more in the last decade than perhaps any other part of running a company. We've moved from steak-and-martini sales to bottoms-up PLG adoption, and both buyers and sellers are demanding more efficient experiences. This shift has made Growth Marketing (to automate outreach to relevant customers) and RevOps (to give sellers the right data, tools and processes) two of the most critical functions in modern companies. Just like developers have IDEs to build software, GTM teams need their own development environment to turn ideas into reality.
That's why we're excited to announce our continued investment in Clay, with Meritech leading a second round in less than a year. The company has emerged as the platform that allows GTM teams to turn any growth idea into reality by blending the powers of the best data, AI agents, and flexible workflows. From the time we first invested in April 2024 through the end of the year, Clay added more than 2x the amount of net new ARR we had expected – a testament to the ROI of the product and quality / execution of the team.
You may have heard Clay described as a GTM development environment, a creative tool for growth, a GTM Ops platform, or a growth hacker's dream. Clay is an AI data enrichment and workflow automation platform that helps GTM teams unleash their creativity via more efficient, centralized work. But here's what makes it special: for a long time, B2B growth has been tied to growing sales headcount, with roles like SDRs spending countless hours on manual research and outreach. Clay changes this equation.
Clay, via AI and automation, offloads the monotonous work of finding and researching good-fit customers to more technical roles like RevOps and Growth Marketing. This doesn't mean replacing SDRs: Clay believes that there's no substitute for human authenticity and creativity in standing out from the crowd and nurturing human relationships. Instead, it helps SDRs – or marketers, CX teams, etc – perform in their zone of genius, while automation takes care of repetitive labor. Clay coined an entirely new role: the GTM Engineer, who combines the skills of SDRs, AEs, and sales engineers, to run growth experiments. Now, in dozens of companies, GTM Engineers launch growth experiments, RevOps scales the experiments that work, and sellers are focusing on actually selling.
Here's how Clay works: You start by sourcing new prospects or pulling existing ones into their highly flexible spreadsheet-like front-end. From there, you can enrich these with >100 data sources that Clay partners with. Instead of dealing with multiple vendor contracts, you can access everything with Clay Credits or bring your own data provider relationships and pipe their data into Clay for free. The benefit to the 100+ data providers that partner with Clay is both discoverability and distribution to new market segments.
Clay's approach to data is unique for two reasons, as compared to other data enrichment tools like ZoomInfo:
They're not a black box – you know exactly which data provider the information is coming from
They're not a walled garden – you can bring in multiple data providers
The platform has some serious technical chops. Clay’s 'waterfall enrichment' lets you sequentially search and prioritize data points across multiple vendors based on your criteria. For deeper and more bespoke research, they've built an AI research agent (Claygent) that can visit any website and find/summarize data points or synthesize information (e.g., is this a b2b or b2c company.) You can manipulate and score data, use their AI to write personalized emails, automate outreach, or push enrichment data back to your core systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Snowflake.
Here is an illustration of how the product works and the products it can supplement or replace:
Clay is extremely powerful and flexible: it seems like there is always more you can / should be doing with it. As a result, a massive ecosystem has formed around Clay. There's an active Clay Community Slack channel with over 18k practitioners sharing growth ideas and support. They've also built an impressive network of Clay Experts (or "Claygencies") helping customers optimize their Clay deployments, similar to how HubSpot's 6,500 agencies have enabled their growth journey.
Clay is helping their customers drive more predictable revenue. They started with 3rd party firmographic data (e.g., email addresses) and outbound GTM use cases (e.g., cold emailing prospects), and have expanded into 1st party behavioral data (e.g., sales materials, product usage) and inbound GTM use cases (e.g., sending a personalized message to a warm lead that reviewed sales collateral or personalizing a landing page for the specific person visiting). And there is so much more coming in 2025 and beyond.
If you are interested in learning more, visit Clay University or check out the countless user-generated YouTube videos. And if you want to try Clay (for free), you can sign up here.
Congrats to Kareem Amin, Varun Anand and the entire Clay team on this well deserved milestone!