When we first met Clay five years ago, we were excited to find an ambitious team with novel and compelling insights, building a great product for a large market. Yet, it was also a very different company from the one we know today.

Back then, the platform was focused on workflow and data integration—an intuitive and powerful combination of spreadsheet interfaces, data ingestion, and functional programming that helped customers automate and streamline complex operations without extensive technical expertise. You could feed Clay a list of URLs of websites, for example, and in just a few clicks build a database of company descriptions, social profiles, review ratings, and more.

It was impressive, simple, and truly innovative—no surprise it came from a team led by Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan. After starting their careers at Microsoft, their first company, Frame, was acquired by the marketing automation business Sailthru. References on CEO Kareem told us he deeply understood the ever-changing ways developers used data—and they said he was thoughtful, trustworthy and wickedly smart. We were also struck by his sincerity and passion for solving his customers’ problems. Clay wasn’t just about efficiency. It was about empowering more people, not just developers, to fully use the power of their computers to do amazing things. We were grateful for the opportunity to partner with them and lead the Series A.

Customers liked Clay, too. It was a valuable tool for quickly moving data, and it made integration easy—at a moment when increasingly tech-savvy business users were looking for more low- and no-code customization. However, many users weren’t sure where to start, and at first, Clay’s growth was modest.

But the team was determined to change that, and over the past couple of years, Kareem and co-founder Varun Anand, who joined in 2021, have led Clay through a tremendous transformation. The company set a new mission of helping businesses grow and found strong product-market fit as the data orchestration layer for modern go-to-market teams.

At its most basic level, sales and marketing are about finding potential customers, learning about them, and reaching out—and Clay improves and automates that process at every step. The average sales development rep spends two-thirds of their time on manual tasks such as building lists, researching leads, and writing emails; just one-third goes to actually interacting with people. With Clay, growth teams can flip those numbers and then some. 

First, Clay’s marketplace enables customers to gather information from over 75 data enrichment tools—a unique vendor-agnostic approach that provides the rare combination of low cost, high coverage, high accuracy, and convenience. Then, the platform’s AI-powered research agent consolidates that data—and helps scale outreach by automatically crafting personalized messages to each prospect. Thanks to the years of work Kareem, Varun and the team have put into building out integrations, it works seamlessly with other GTM tools. Clay’s customers send fewer, better messages to people who are more likely to be a good fit, and SDRs get to focus on real conversations and closing deals.

Today, Clay boasts some 100,000 users across more than 2,500 companies, including Anthropic, Intercom, Notion, Vanta, and Verkada. Customers are seeing both data coverage and outreach campaign response rates double and even triple. Metrics aside, Clay is a clear outlier in customer love. Just as they were at the start of our partnership, our more recent reference calls have been effusive: one customer called the platform “the most impressive piece of software I’ve used in my career,” while another memorably declared, “If someone told me I had to get rid of Clay, I’d go on a two-week retreat to think about what my life had become.” (If you’d like to see for yourself what they’re raving about, you can try it for free.)

The Clay team, in turn, is reaping the benefits of their grit and determination, with 10x growth year-over-year for each of the past two years since their relaunch, and has expanded from 10 people to 50 and counting. As they announce this Series B round, we at Sequoia are as excited as ever to be in their corner, to watch them continue to evolve, and to support them on their mission of helping companies grow.