Clay raises $100M Series C at $3.1B valuation led by CapitalG to expand AI-powered GTM automation

We'll talk to you soon. Bye. And up next, we have another massive gong moment. Let's bring in Kareem from Clay. We'll get the update from him. Welcome to the stream. Kareem Clay AI. How you doing? Hello. What's going on? How you doing? Give us the latest. Give us the update. What's new in your world? What do you do?

Break it down for us. Can give you all those things. Excited to be here. Um, great to have you. Yeah. Well, today we announced that we raised 100 million from Alphabets Capital G. Congratulations. Thank you. And a $3. 1 billion valuation. So, wow. Three Jet Blues. That's crazy. Amazing.

We've been dogging on Jet Blue a little bit today, but that is fantastic. Congrats. Classic overnight success. You started the company like a few months ago. Yeah, like uh eight years ago. Yeah.

I was going to say so the story so so give us give us like the journey how you got here because I think like you guys have been a massive beneficiary of of LLMs from what I know over the last few years but it was not a uh was not an overnight success I'll call it a spiral um yeah I mean we started the company with the idea of how do we give the power of programming to an order of magnitude more people Mhm.

And I was saying it took me some time to reformulate that to how do we give that to what we call go to market engineers. So it's like half of the company can't code but has all of these ideas of how to grow the company. Um and Clay basically gives them the power to program revenue instead of just program software.

Let's make that a lot more concrete.

uh there's been this cool wave of uh designers going from 0x engineers to 1x engineers and that's had a lot of uh a lot of benefits in organizations but what does that actually look like concretely on a go to market team is that just generating emails faster managing a um a CRM like what are we actually talking about in terms of detail yeah the actually like most important part is who should you reach out to that's actually like I would say 60% of kind Like there there's two ways to grow your company.

Either you find new customers or you expand existing ones. If we just talk about finding new customers, 60% of that is finding the right person, right? And then kind of like reaching them at the right time is another 20%. So what we do is um let me give you an example.

One of our customers, they have a ton of people just going on Google Maps, looking at all the different locations that they sell to, finding warehouses, and then manually counting the number of parking spots that uh that warehouse has because that's a good indicator if they're a good customer.

And so we can use Google Maps API and LLMs to do that counting for them. Oh, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah. So really most of it is about like account selection and finding the right people. And then the second part is, you know, did they just raise a round of funding like us?

Was there some kind of new news story that uh did they just hire a few people in a department that you're selling to? And it's very specific to what your company does in their product. Got it.

Is this uh every I've I've asked this question on the on the show before, but uh it feels pretty common that you know some random private equity firm will just be spamming people on the internet trying to buy their companies. Oftent times there's probably good targeting. Oftent times there there's bad targeting.

How close are we to just like eliminating those those emails that are just kind of uh those out that outreach the spray and prey outreach? When when is spray and prey gonna gonna going to end? I hope not.

I mean, I think that that's kind of like one of our top goals is if you actually I think you could think of it as what if you actually put in the effort um and the thoughtfulness into figuring out who actually wants your product. One, you reduce spam and two, you actually increase like your own productivity.

It's just that that's hard to do at scale. And the best companies like RAMP, like there's a lot of companies who figured out how to do that internally. What Clay is doing is giving that to every company. And really what that means is that businesses can find each other um faster and more accurately.

So I think it should end up benefiting everyone. That makes sense. Anything else? $100 million. Where how are you going to spend it? Um hopefully we don't spend it. Yeah, always a good clay.

Yeah, I think that um one of the key like really exciting things about clay is that we have this huge community um that has emerged around us. So there's uh clay agencies, so people who implement clay. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah.

There's like 60 clubs in 29 countries where people meet up to talk about different techniques because if you think about it in sales, like you're always figuring out how to be creative, how to be unique. Um, and Clay is a tool that lets you do that.

I almost think of it like Ableton is for music or like you said, Figma is for designers. Clay is for go to market teams. They're doing deals. Interesting. Exactly. So, we want to use that money to support that community. So, we're having a conference actually sculpt um in uh September in San Francisco.

So, we need to we're going to do more events like that. Um, and then there's a lot of investment into the product there. We're just touching the surface of what we can build. Yeah.

Are is there any functionality to share workflows or create some sort of marketplace for workflows like uh you know yes there are agencies on top of Shopify that do uh design but then there are also templates and so you gave some examples of you know uh new funding announcement in my category that seems like something that I could be able to just pull off the shelf and not even not even build from scratch within Clay.

Yeah, totally. I feel like you you should really join our team. This is this is exactly where you're going. I'm leaving your road map. Yeah, sorry. We'll leave it there. Yeah, we'll leave it there. Well, good luck. Uh very exciting time and congratulations on the massive round. Awesome. Appreciate it.

Thanks for having to talk. Bye. Good stuff. Well, John, I got to get on with London and I'm sure you got to get on with Taipei. I do have to get on with Taipei. Why don't we end it there? Thank you for tuning in to the show today. Thanks to everyone in the chat. I agree. The deeper the V-neck, the more funding you get.

So, good strategy. It's a good good I didn't say it, but I think it's true. $100 million deal. Really deep V looking good. I I you know, the next round is Yeah. Yeah.

It was funny because we I clearly you could see the bottom of the V-neck if we had shown the full screen, but we had a ticker and so the ticker made it look like you don't know where that thing ends. It could just keep go forever. Um, but Palmer Lucky has made a vest. Palmer Lucky has made the Hawaiian t-shirt iconic.

Maybe Kareem makes uh the the Deep V iconic at Clay. He's a good energy. I I was I was into it. Anyway, awesome folks. Thank you so much for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Leave us some reviews. Leave us some reviews. Uh send us some notes. Send us some reply to some threads.

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