Sacra estimates that Clay reached $150M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in May 2026, up from $108M at the end of 2025.

Clay monetizes via subscription SaaS and usage-based pricing, but in March 2026 restructured from a single credit-based model into a dual-meter system of Data Credits and Actions. Data Credits pay for third-party enrichment and AI/data costs, while Actions meter the execution steps in a workflow, including HTTP calls, CRM syncs, AI tasks, enrichments, sequencer sends, and other automation steps.

The pricing change cut many native enrichment costs by 50-90%, stopped charging for failed enrichment lookups, and moved CRM sync, HTTP APIs, and Web Intent down from the old $800 Pro tier into the new $495 Growth tier, while introducing Actions as a way for Clay to monetize orchestration even when customers bring their own API keys.

Because Clay’s older model included pass-through data licensing costs, gross margins looked more like a data-heavy SaaS company than pure software; the March 2026 shift toward Actions should improve blended gross margin over time by separating lower-margin enrichment revenue from higher-margin platform orchestration revenue.

In January 2026, Clay reached a $5 billion valuation following a $55 million employee tender offer led by DST.

Previously, in August 2025, Clay closed a $100 million Series C led by CapitalG at a $3.1 billion post-money valuation—about a 2x step-up from a May 2025 tender offer led by Sequoia (a secondary transaction).

Founded in 2019, Clay raised its pre-seed with NYC-based BoxGroup (David Tisch). In 2021 the company secured a $2.5 million seed round led by First Round Capital followed by a 2023 $13.5 million Series A led by Sequoia.

In 2024, Clay entered hyperscale mode where it raised in quick succession a $46 million Series B in June 2024 at a $500 million valuation led by Meritech Capital, followed seven months later by a $40 million pre-emptive Series B "expansion" that lifted the price to $1.25 billion—before the tender at $1.5B and Series C at $3.1B. Altogether, Clay has raised at least $202 million of primary equity.

Clay is an Excel or Airtable-esque spreadsheet focused on sales. Like Airtable, the user creates tables, each one of which is a live database for a specific go-to-market workflow. Each record in the table is a prospect or company and each column is a data field that can hold text, a formula or an AI step.

A typical flow starts with data ingestion (CSV upload, Google Sheets sync, API, or pasted LinkedIn URLs). You then stack actions in columns either a static field or a dynamic action—“Find Email,” “Summarize Website,” “Generate Intro Line”.

Then you add fallback logic (try Apollo first, Hunter second), layer GPT blocks to tailor copy, preview a handful of rows, and click Run. Clean, enriched records can sync straight to HubSpot or Salesforce, trigger a webhook to Zapier, or export as CSV for email tools—where they're ready to populate templates and get sent (via email for instance).

Clay sits neatly between raw data and every system that needs it as an orchestration layer that brings together from multiple sources, makes it actionable and then syncs it out to the different systems which actually send the messaging.

In short, Clay gives go-to-market teams a single canvas to source, enrich, filter, personalize, and distribute data-driven outreach—no code, one price meter, and workflows you can clone or tweak in minutes instead of stitching together half a dozen separate tools.

Clay sells subscription SaaS with unlimited seats and usage-based consumption, historically through credits bundled into monthly plans and now through a dual-meter model that separates Data Credits from Actions. The current self-serve tiers are Launch at $185/month and Growth at $495/month, with Enterprise on custom pricing, while existing customers can remain on legacy plans.

Each Data Credit acts like a token that pays for data and AI costs. When a table asks Clay to “Find email,” “Grab technographics,” or “Summarize a website with GPT,” the platform decides which of 150-plus data vendors or AI providers to hit and deducts the relevant credits. Customers that already hold their own ZoomInfo, Clearbit, Apollo, or other data-provider keys can plug them in and avoid Clay’s native enrichment costs, but under the March 2026 pricing change, those workflows still consume Actions for execution steps like HTTP calls, CRM syncs, AI tasks, sequencer sends, and enrichment runs. That mix lets teams fine-tune the quality-versus-cost trade-off column by column, while letting Clay monetize the orchestration layer itself.

Because COGS are mainly cloud infrastructure, pass-through data licensing, and AI model usage, Clay’s gross margins have historically looked more like a data-heavy SaaS firm than the 80-plus percent of pure software. The shift toward Actions should improve blended gross margin over time, because platform orchestration carries higher margin than third-party data resale, even as AI-intensive workflows still bring variable model costs. Management runs the company close to breakeven: at $30 million of 2024 revenue, Clay generated a slight loss, implying low-single-digit negative operating margin and capital-efficient growth.

Expansion is primarily consumption-led. As more people inside a customer rely on Clay tables and workflows—feeding webform leads, scheduling nightly CRM enrichments, launching signal-based outbound plays, syncing paid audiences, mining Gong transcripts, or exposing Clay workflows to reps through AI assistants—Data Credit and Action consumption rises and the customer steps up to larger plans. Upsells also come from advanced features like CRM write-backs, higher usage limits, Audiences, Functions, Clay Ads, and Enterprise governance, plus occasional one-off top-ups in peak campaign periods. Over time, the combination of unlimited seats, sticky workflow automations, reusable GTM logic, and usage-based pricing turns Clay’s customers into larger, reliably recurring revenue streams.

Clay's rapid rise means that it's early days in terms of Clay fast followers.

Persana AI (Y Combinator, $2.3M seed in October 2024) is one, which wraps Clay's offering into an agentic framework and positions to compete directly as a Clay alternative on GTM data orchestration.

These platforms bundle data, sequencing and light CRM into a single license. They compete by promising one log-in and seat-based pricing, but they lock users into a proprietary data well and lack Clay’s mix-and-match vendor model.

Customers can use Clay together with a GTM all-in-one, a GTM all-in-one standalone, or Clay with a best-in-breed outreach product. Among upsarts, Apollo falls here, especially as it expands its data offering. Among incumbents, HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS) goes here as it has CRM and outreach in addition to Breeze through its acquisition of Clearbit, and Zoominfo (NASDAQ: GTM) does this for enterprise.

These incumbents own the raw data layer. Clay both buys from and competes with them: customers can connect their own licenses to avoid credit burn, or let Clay resell the data at a per-lookup charge. Companies like Apollo, HubSpot and Zoominfo all have data enrichment products.

On the more data-centric side, we have companies like Cogism, Lusha, LeadIQ and People Data Labs.