Clay Lands $46M Series B

AI-sales and marketing startup Clay Labs closed on a $46 million Series B that valued the firm at $500 million. Clay assists with data aggregation, customer research, and AI-driven personalization. Meritech Capital led the round with Sequoia Capital , First Round Capital , BoxGroup , boldstart ventures , Anthropic , Intercom , and Notion joining.

Clay claims that its customers no longer need to choose between “zero-targeting, high scale (spam)” and “deep targeting, low scale (time consuming) outreach.” With Clay, customers enjoy “highly targeted, personalized outreach at scale.”

Clay describes itself as the “orchestration platform for modern go-to-market teams,” pulling in data from 75 enrichment tools. Clay claims that broad enrichment triples coverage and accuracy, with Clay customers enjoying 80% to 90% coverage.

Clay supports Waterfall Enrichment, with customers determining the search order for data.? For example, users can enrich work emails from Prospeo , Dropcontact , Datagma , Hunter.io , People Data Labs , Nimbler - B2B Contacts, AI-Powered Outbound Campaigns, and Contact Data Enrichment , Apollo.io , Lusha , Snov.io , and others.

“Great outreach starts with customer research: you need to know who to target and why. Traditionally, customer research has been expensive and manual,” argued Clay CEO Kareem Amin . “Growth teams typically buy incomplete, point-in-time databases with information like employee count or fundraising stage. These databases often have incomplete coverage of the information companies need, forcing them to buy and combine these data sets manually. Next, companies employ Sales Development Reps (SDRs) to scour the web to enrich that data with bespoke information (e.g., is the company SOC II compliant? When was the founder last mentioned in the news?).”

Once these steps are completed, the rep can write a personalized message to the prospect, but doing so is quite time-consuming.

To further assist sales reps, Clay offers a set of Claygents that perform bespoke research tasks such as identifying a prospect’s competitors, determining its level of SOC compliance, or researching pricing plans.

“With Clay, a single person can now run campaigns—whether outbound, inbound, expansion, or retention—that previously required coordinating the entire GTM team,” wrote Amin. “We decided to build a more powerful tool that targets technical users like growth marketers and rev-ops because this enables customers to centralize and manage all of their GTM workflows and experiments in one place. This means companies can send fewer, better messages—and only to people who are a good mutual fit. And sales representatives can focus on nurturing customer relationships and closing deals.”

Clay includes an OpenAI email writer that leverages Clay’s aggregated customer intelligence.? Users can write their own responses or use Clay’s AI templates.? Personalized outreach can be sent through Smartlead , Instantly.ai , Salesloft , Outreach , or Customer.io .

Clay launched on Product Hunt in February 2022 and has grown 10X each of the last two years, “almost entirely through word-of-mouth.”? The company grew from ten to fifty employees over that time and now serves 100,000 users and over 2500 customers.

Word of mouth has been strong with 11,000 people exchanging ideas and providing feedback on Slack.

“There are dozens of Claygencies (agencies that specialize in Clay), some of which have multi-million dollar run rates,” crowed Amin. “Grassroot boot camps and newsletters are teaching people how to grow their companies with Clay.”

Clay employs a freemium model, with prices ranging from free to $2,000 per month for 150,000 monthly credits. An enterprise edition, which includes unlimited users, unlimited rows (API), dedicated support, “private Clay recipes,” and Snowflake integration, has custom pricing.

Credit charges are a function of the data type, vendor, and action taken.? “The vast majority of actions in Clay are either free, or cost 1-2 credits, but the average cost of a data point or action varies depending on the provider.”?

For example, emails cost two Clay credits for Prospeo, DropContact, Datagma, and?Hunter.io, but five credits for People Data Labs emails.? Mobile numbers vary from two credits to as much as 25 (Datagma).

Annual plans support monthly credit rollovers, upfront access to all credits, and a ten percent discount.

Keyplay CEO Adam Schoenfeld , who studies PLG strategies, said that the Clay story was more than a great product, a strong team, and brand name investors.? The key to understanding Clay’s growing success is its GTM strategy and a “unique flywheel:”

1. Low entry price + PLG: Brings lots of people in to try/learn without friction.

2. Strong user community: Supports those people and gets them excited to learn the tools.

3. Agency program: Gives power users a way to make money as Clay experts. Some are making millions of revenue.

4. Massive army of influencers: Because agencies and power users have skin in the game (and Clay supports them) they promote it with tons of energy.

This flywheel creates a buzz that “brings more people in to try/experiment/learn…and the cycle repeats,” remarked Schoenfeld.

Lavender V3 in Beta

Sales AI Email Coach Lavender ???? www.ora.im rolled its V3 release into beta. The full release, expected later this summer, sports faster writing times through improved personalization tools and insights, and an enhanced coaching system with segmented and custom dynamic models.

By design, Lavender doesn’t want to replace sales reps but make them more effective, a sharp contrast with many SalesTech vendors. Lavender’s AI helps sales orgs understand why emails work and uses this understanding to help reps quickly write effective emails.... [Continue]

Additional Resources

Clay: Website | "Clay raises $62M at a $500M valuation to turn any growth idea into reality"

GZ Consulting Topics: SalesTech | Generative AI | Data Enrichment | Email Assistant

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