Clay's $7.1 billion round shows what New York investors will pay for AI sales tools
The go-to-market software startup raised $115 million at more than double last year's valuation, part of a broader surge in New York AI funding.
Clay, a New York-based software company that sells artificial intelligence tools to sales and marketing teams, closed a $115 million funding round on September 9. The round values the company at $7.1 billion, more than double the $3.1 billion it was worth roughly a year earlier.
The Series D was led by Wellington Management, with Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz's Perennial fund, CapitalG, Meritech, DST Global, StepStone, BoxGroup, Boldstart and Bloomberg Beta also participating. Clay now says it serves more than 17,000 customers, up from 10,000 a year ago, including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Stripe and Siemens.
What Clay Actually Sells
Clay describes itself as a go-to-market, or GTM, platform. It pulls business and contact data from more than 200 outside sources, then uses artificial intelligence agents to research prospective customers, track competitors and draft personalized outreach messages at scale.
The product includes a feature Clay calls a data "waterfall," which automatically scans multiple outside sources to fill in missing information about a potential customer, and a chat interface that lets sales staff search for leads using plain-language requests. Clients can also build custom AI agents to handle multistep sales tasks, from drafting follow-up emails to generating ad copy.
Clay has promoted the idea of a new job category it calls "GTM engineering," pairing sales operations know-how with AI automation skills. According to figures Clay has published, more than 280 openings for the role existed across companies including Cursor, Webflow and Notion, with a median salary of about $160,000.
A Valuation That Kept Climbing
Clay's valuation has moved in a nearly straight line upward since the start of 2025. A Series B extension in February 2025 valued the company at $1.25 billion. A tender offer that let early employees sell shares, led by Sequoia in May 2025, put the value at $1.5 billion.
In August 2025, Clay raised $100 million in a Series C round led by CapitalG, Alphabet's growth fund, at a $3.1 billion valuation. Chief executive Kareem Amin told The New York Times at the time that the company expected to end 2025 with about $100 million in annual revenue, roughly triple the prior year.
A further employee tender offer in January 2026 valued Clay at $5 billion. The September Series D brings the total to $7.1 billion and lifts Clay's cumulative funding to $317 million since it was founded in 2017. One outlet, BetaKit, rounded the new valuation to "$7 billion" in its headline; most other coverage put the figure at $7.1 billion.
Revenue Claims and Where They Come From
Clay has not published audited revenue figures. The $100 million year-end 2025 estimate came from Amin's own comments to reporters. Trade publication SiliconANGLE reported, citing The New York Times, that Clay's annualized revenue was on track to reach $200 million by the end of the current quarter and that the company had been briefly profitable earlier in 2026.
Those numbers have not been independently verified and should be treated as estimates rather than audited results.
“Clay's jump from a $1.25 billion valuation to $7.1 billion in about 19 months is among the more pronounced examples of that funding pattern, though it is not the only one.”
New York's Role, With State Money Attached
Clay's headquarters is in Manhattan, and the state has a direct financial stake in its growth. On April 3, 2026, Gov. Kathy Hochul's office and Empire State Development announced that Clay would lease more than 163,000 square feet of office space at 11 Madison Avenue in the Flatiron District.
In exchange for creating 498 new full-time jobs over five years and investing $50 million in New York-based research and development, Clay is eligible for up to $9.96 million in performance-based tax credits through the state's Excelsior Jobs Program. Construction on the buildout, estimated at $30 million, is expected to finish in February 2027.
"The global race for artificial intelligence leadership is happening right now — and New York is winning," Hochul said in the announcement. Empire State Development president and CEO Hope Knight said Clay's expansion was "a strong signal that New York continues to be a destination where innovative companies can start, scale, and succeed." As of that April announcement, Clay employed about 250 people in New York, with additional offices in San Francisco and London.
Part of a Broader Wave
Clay's raise landed in a year when New York's startup fundraising has been unusually strong. According to a report from AlleyWatch, New York City startups raised $8.88 billion across 233 deals in the second quarter of 2026, a 46% increase in capital over the same period a year earlier and the strongest second quarter for the city since 2021.
AI companies accounted for 51% of that quarter's capital, or $4.56 billion across 81 companies, the report found. Two AI research labs, Flourish and General Intuition, raised $500 million and $320 million respectively in June 2026, rounds AlleyWatch described as the first time foundational AI model development occurred at scale in New York, rather than software built on top of models developed elsewhere.
A separate AlleyWatch weekly report covering the week of Clay's announcement listed several other New York AI companies raising money in the same stretch, including Rogo, an AI workflow platform for investment banking, and Forus, an AI medication-access platform, alongside larger San Francisco rounds for Cognition and Harvey. Clay's jump from a $1.25 billion valuation to $7.1 billion in about 19 months is among the more pronounced examples of that funding pattern, though it is not the only one.
