Clay

Clay is a software company that builds go-to-market infrastructure, describing itself as the creative tool for growth that lets businesses go to market with unique data and act on it. Its platform is designed to help teams get data, run agentic workflows and launch GTM plays. This places it in sales and marketing technology, where revenue, sales and marketing teams buy tools to find prospects, keep customer records current and automate outreach.

The product is organised around data, agents, orchestration and execution. A data marketplace lets customers buy data from more than 200 providers under one contract, combine first and third party sources, and use a waterfall approach that layers several providers to improve coverage. AI research agents called Claygents investigate target companies and people, while workflow tools update records in CRMs and data warehouses, and execution features sync targeted audiences to major ad platforms or automate messaging through a native sequencer. Taken together, these pieces let a team move from sourcing data to acting on it within one platform, matching the company's stated focus on unique data and the ability to act on it.

Clay began in Brooklyn in 2017 with a spreadsheet that let anyone connect information and automate work without writing code. After salespeople, growth teams and small agencies adopted it to find and reach customers, the company focused on their needs, and it says it coined GTM engineering as a career in 2023. That role blends technical skills with sales operations work, and the company supports it with training resources, a community program, a job board for GTM engineers and a partner program. Companies that have used Clay include Intercom, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Verkada and Hex.