This Secret Weapon For Anthropic And OpenAI Boosted Its Valuation To $1.3 Billion

Forbes

The seven-year-old startup took years to figure out its product, which uses AI to filter up better data on sales leads. Now it’s growing fast, with tens of millions in revenue and a valuation that’s doubled in six months.  Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2025/01/21/clay-ai-growth-software-one-billion-valuation/  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Today on Forbes, Clay, a secret weapon for Anthropic and OpenAI, boosts valuation to

00:07$1.3 billion.

00:11When Clay CEO Karim Amin logged off in September 2021 to embark upon a 10-day meditation retreat,

00:18he had the future of his business to think about.

00:21Four years of work on the New York-based startup had seen Amin tinker on a few ideas in pursuit

00:26of a grand vision of making programming more accessible for everyone, developers and non-coders

00:32alike.

00:33But Amin felt like he was at a crossroads.

00:36Clay had landed on a product that functioned as a no-code internal app builder for anyone

00:41in a business, be they an accountant, marketer, or salesperson.

00:45A supercharged spreadsheet connected outside data sources for them in one spot.

00:50Other software helped them manage workflows.

00:53Another allowed them to program in whatever else they wanted.

00:57But with users, one unglamorous application for Clay's software was resonating above

01:01all.

01:02Go-to-market efforts, centered mostly on the spreadsheet part.

01:06There, growth teams responsible for filtering up the best leads to their sales colleagues

01:11were collecting intel like what other software tools prospects were already using, who their

01:16own clients were, and where potential decision-makers used to work.

01:20This wasn't the highest-impact use case that Amin could imagine.

01:24But it was what customers needed, he realized.

01:27Instead of building the biggest possible tool, Clay just needed to build something useful.

01:32Amin told Forbes, quote,

01:33I had this internal pressure of ambition about the kind of impact we could have in the world.

01:38We would switch from one manifestation of the idea to another.

01:42Removing that, paradoxically, has allowed us to potentially realize that ambition.

01:48Narrowing Clay's aperture from a do-anything, horizontal solution to one pointed only at

01:53growth wasn't a small step.

01:56It meant axing the code tool and workflows, and losing clients.

02:00Amin's co-founder and some early employees departed for other startup ideas.

02:05But the result was significant.

02:06An immediate and steady influx of customers, renewed investor interest, and a so-called

02:11overnight success years in the making.

02:15Today, Clay works with more than 5,000 businesses, including AI shops Anthropic and OpenAI,

02:22and software unicorns Canva, Ramp, and Rippling.

02:26After increasing tenfold in the previous two years each, sales were up 6x for 2024,

02:31giving the startup about $30 million in revenue for 2024, at a minimal loss.

02:37Contract sizes run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

02:41Then there's the ecosystem that has emerged around Clay.

02:44Far beyond its own 95 employees, Clay maintains a Slack channel of 18,000-plus users.

02:51More than 90 small consulting agencies make a living, in several instances, more than

02:56a million dollars, helping other businesses use Clay.

03:00Investors who once had to defend their bets on the business are now eager to pour more

03:04funds into Clay.

03:06The most recent?

03:07A new $40 million investment in Clay that values the business at $1.25 billion, more

03:14than doubling its valuation in just six months.

03:18Clay's trajectory to fast-growing unicorn status after years of a slow burn has proven

03:23early backers prescient.

03:25But how Clay uses generative AI, both within its own product and through AI agents used

03:30by customers, makes it stand out as an early success story for businesses looking for real-world

03:36use cases of a new technology that generates dollars, not just hype.

03:41Already handling the licensing and collection of outside, third-party data for customers,

03:46Clay has capitalized on improvements in AI to supercharge those efforts.

03:51Clay's software can now do some of the work for the user, predicting what data points

03:55and patterns might be valuable.

03:58Its AI agent, called Claygent, can take a potentially valuable but complicated question,

04:04such as finding every previously disclosed customer of a company, or every person on

04:09LinkedIn who worked in certain roles at that company over a specific time period, and return

04:14just the results.

04:17For full coverage, check out Alex Conrad's piece on Forbes.com.

04:23This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.

04:25Thanks for tuning in.

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