The US provider Clay secures 115 million dollars in a new funding round and is valued at 7.1 billion dollars – more than double what it was in August 2025. The round is led by the asset manager Wellington Management. More than 17,000 companies are already using the AI software to automate sales research and customer outreach.
Wellington Management leads record round for sales AI
Clay confirmed the new funding round on September 9, 2026, in a press release. The largest share of the 115 million dollars comes from the asset manager Wellington Management, which leads the round. Also participating are well-known investors such as Sequoia Capital, the venture capital fund Perennial from Andreessen Horowitz, StepStone Group, Meritech, DST Global, and Alphabet’s investment arm CapitalG. Smaller investors BoxGroup, Boldstart Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and Evolution Equity Partners are also participating in the round again.
The announcement does not specify in detail what Clay intends to use the capital for. The company’s valuation has more than doubled in just 13 months: In August 2025, it was still at 3.1 billion dollars, and in January 2026, it rose to 5 billion dollars through an employee stock buyback program led by DST. Clay thus joins a series of particularly highly valued funding rounds for AI companies – just a few days earlier, the programming assistant Cognition reached a valuation of 48 billion dollars.
Platform consolidates AI agents for sales research and customer outreach
The platform consolidates contact data from more than 200 external sources and allows sales teams to define target groups via natural language text input. Through the so-called Waterfall function, Clay searches multiple data providers sequentially until complete and up-to-date contact profiles are available. The software also automatically updates records, so sales teams no longer have to maintain outdated contact lists. Subsequently, AI agents create personalized emails and conversation guides for customer outreach and can be configured for multi-step sales workflows.
According to the company, more than 17,000 teams are now using the software, including 80 percent of the startups listed in the Forbes AI50 ranking. Among the mentioned customers are AI providers Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, as well as payment service providers Stripe and Visa, the industrial group Siemens, and the logistics company UPS. Clay thus also acts as a supplier to direct competitors in the AI business. According to TechFundingNews, Clay positions itself at the intersection of traditional sales software and autonomous AI agents, a particularly high-growth market segment according to its own analysis.
New job role Go-to-Market Engineer grows rapidly
According to its own statements, Clay reached an annual revenue of 100 million dollars by the end of December 2025. The market research company Sacra estimates the value for May 2026 at around 150 million dollars. By the end of the current quarter, the figure is expected to rise to 200 million dollars, according to a report by SiliconANGLE – a number that Clay has not officially confirmed in its own announcement and which therefore cannot be independently verified.
In parallel to the funding round, the company is establishing a scholarship fund equipped with one million dollars for the self-coined job role Go-to-Market Engineer. The title introduced in 2023 refers to professionals who automate sales and marketing processes with AI agents like those from Clay; according to the company, several thousand GTM Engineers are now organizing themselves in nearly 100 so-called Clay Clubs worldwide. Clay thus joins the legal AI provider Harvey, which raised 550 million dollars for its business on the same day, in a growing series of industry-specific AI providers with billion-dollar valuations.
It will be crucial whether Clay actually invests the fresh capital in more autonomous agents that independently manage complete sales campaigns – according to its own statements, the next stage of development for the platform. It remains to be seen how many of the currently billion-valued GTM AI providers will be able to compete long-term against established CRM companies like Salesforce, which are also investing heavily in their own AI agents.
