Hello, and welcome back to Inc.'s 1 Smart Business Story. In 2021, Clay was a struggling startup that was on the verge of collapse. Its founders had spent years chasing an idea that never quite found its footing, key engineers had moved on, and the CEO admitted he nearly shut down. Then a small pivot changed everything, and today Clays is valued at $5 billion.

Clay’s core product looks deceptively simple: a spreadsheet. But inside it, salespeople are doing things that would have required entire teams just two years ago, like building personalized websites for prospects, automating outreach across 150 data sources, and landing clients at companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Canva. Revenue went from $1 million to $100 million in roughly two years. They've never lost an enterprise customer and 30% of new business comes through word of mouth, which is almost unheard of in B2B software.

But the most surprising thing about Clay isn't the product. It's the culture that built it: a CEO who bought a gong for his birthday and explicitly banned it from being rung for sales wins, a co-founder who once ran a "cocks not Glocks" protest, and a team that hired a professional clown for team-building. 

In this article you’ll find:

BY JENNIFER CONRAD, SENIOR WRITER

Sales administrators step aside. Clay’s “go to market engineers” are turning spreadsheets into an art.

On a Wednesday night an after-work crowd of about two dozen people gathered in the second-floor event space of a luxury apartment complex in San Diego’s Carmel Valley neighborhood. The decor was vaguely midcentury modern, and the tables were strewn with notebooks and baseball caps from Clay, a fast-growing B2B software company that helps users identify and create targeted outreach for sales prospects.

The group, known as a Clay Club, included power users, solopreneurs, and executives who were curious about how AI could supercharge their businesses. There are more than 90 such clubs around the world, in locations as far afield as Cape Town and Amsterdam.

“Clay is a very revolutionary product that made my life so, so much easier,” says David 

Shamula, the host of San Diego’s Clay Club. “It’s a little nerdy; it’s a little complex,” he adds. As an early adopter, he felt a kinship with people he met in the company-run Slack channels. When Clay introduced user clubs, he jumped at the opportunity to take part in an IRL community.

Attendees snacked on Chipotle burritos as they took notes by hand of the evening’s presentation. No one touched the bottles of red wine stationed near the sink—the San Diego crowd might be too health conscious, joked Shamula, whose tech consulting firm, Outbound Partners, helps other firms with Clay implementations.

Khaled Azar, whose company, Livmo, helps business owners exit by increasing their firms’ value and identifying potential acquirers, gave a half-hour demo, explaining how he used Clay to create simple, targeted websites, including market analysis for potential clients. The whole process, including fiddling with generative AI tools to create the code for each website, took about five hours, he said. In the discussion that followed, attendees asked questions about how to bring in data from subscription-only databases, avoid spam filters, and narrow a long list of potential customers down to those who play a particular sport.

Clay, at its heart, is a souped-up spreadsheet. Each column in a Clay table might include information from more than 150 public and subscription data sources (company name, URL) or actions taken through integrations with various marketing, generative AI, and web publishing tools (write a targeted email using ChatGPT; pull reviews of a business from Google Maps). It feels a bit like Airtable, HubSpot, and Yelp, all rolled into one.

Previously, companies might have subscribed to dozens of data sources or cobbled together information scraped from the web, with the work of collecting and sorting data taking up much of salespeople’s time or outsourced to gig workers. Clay pulls those functions together in a simple interface, cleans data brought in from disparate sources, and incorporates an AI agent that suggests new lines of inquiry.

Clay is currently valued at $5 billion after an employee stock sale in January—over three times its value less than a year ago. The company positions itself at the forefront of a new and fruitful line of work that combines business savvy, rudimentary programming skills, and a healthy dose of creativity. It’s even coined a name for its users: go-to-market engineers.

“Go-to-market engineering is the job of figuring out whom you should reach out to and when, and what you should say at scale using AI,” says Clay co-founder and CEO Kareem Amin, 40. Before Clay, someone doing this work might have had a boring title such as sales administrator or lead-generation researcher. GTM engineers, Amin says, “have a lot of ideas, but they can’t implement them. We decided to give them the power of programming and the ability to turn any of these ideas of growing their company into reality.”

“Clay is the product I wish I’d had when I was operating in sales and marketing,” says Jane Alexander, a partner at Alphabet venture firm CapitalG, and previously the CMO of Carta. She approached Clay for a meeting in the summer of 2024. At the time, the company wasn’t actively seeking investments. Its burn rate, Amin says, was (and still is) just a few million dollars a year.

Rather than presenting AI as a way to replace human workers, he focused on how it could 

empower their work. “In sales and marketing, you’re treated as a process to be optimized. It’s a volume game: Send as many emails as you can,” says Alexander. “What struck me about Kareem was how thoughtful he was about what AI could unlock.” She saw an opportunity, and last year CapitalG led a $100 million Series C round.

Of course, Clay is entering a competitive space. PitchBook estimates that customer relationship management software was a $72 billion global market in 2025. Publicly traded CRM software firm HubSpot, which invested in Clay through its venture arm, reported $2.63 billion in annual revenue for 2024.

For Clay, the challenge will be proving its worth as a standalone software product when all-in-one CRM software firms have begun adding AI tools to their offerings.

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