Now, the company plans to announce on Wednesday that it has raised more money — $115 million — and pushed its valuation to $7.1 billion, more than double what it attained in its last primary fund-raising round in August 2025.
Perhaps more notable is the round’s leader: Wellington Management, a big asset manager investing in start-ups that are likely to go public within a few years. Other participants include Sequoia Capital; A16Z Perennial, an affiliate of Andreessen Horowitz; DST Global; and CapitalG, an investment arm of Alphabet.
The round underscores how many A.I. start-ups are coming of age. They are still posting the kind of vertiginous growth that attracts investors, but they are also keeping an eye on the next potential growth stage, including possible initial public offerings. (Databricks, an A.I. data analytics start-up now valued at $190 billion, has suggested that it is considering an I.P.O.)
Over the past year, Clay has focused on the development of agents, increasingly popular A.I. tools that can operate autonomously. The company’s agents can automate company growth plans, identify promising customers and help strategize outreach to business leads.
Clay is changing its product “to become a self-learning engine,” Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia, said in an interview.
Clay has continued to grow rapidly. Its annualized revenue was on pace to hit about $200 million this quarter, according to Kareem Amin, a founder of the company and its chief executive, significantly above where it was at this time last year.
It is set to reach about $240 million by the end of the fiscal year, and Varun Anand, another Clay founder and its head of operations, said the company expected to double annualized revenue next year.
At the same time, Clay has continued to burn relatively little cash, and it was even briefly profitable this year, according to Mr. Amin.
The company has also been focusing on landing ever-bigger customers, Mr. Anand said. Those include Anthropic, which said that it automatically researches potential leads with its tools; Airbnb, which uses Clay to find hosts for its Experiences business at a wide scale; and DoorDash, which uses the platform to identify paying companies that could sign up for its employee lunch program.
(Mr. Lin of Sequoia added that having Anthropic as a customer showed that even as A.I. giants seek to enhance their models’ abilities, they still rely on other companies for more specialized tools.)
Clay’s growth was what drew the interest of Wellington, which had started tracking Clay a few years ago, according to Rob Mazzoni, a technology-focused investment executive at the asset manager. He said he approached Clay about finally investing in the company this year, with fund-raising talks concluding in just a few days.
“It became increasingly evident that the opportunity for Clay is massive and transcends the traditional sales tools category,” Mr. Mazzoni said in an interview.
Mr. Mazzoni noted that his firm typically begins investing in companies that are anywhere from two to five years away from an I.P.O.
Mr. Amin of Clay said that while the company was not thinking about staging an I.P.O. soon, he and Mr. Anand were running the company as if it were headed in that direction.
