Canadian-founded, New York, NY-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup Clay has officially secured unicorn status after raising a $40-million USD ($57.5-million CAD) funding round at a $1.25-billion USD valuation.
The company, which makes software that automates customer research, is more than doubling its valuation less than a year after raising its $46-million USD ($63 million CAD) Series B round at a $500-million USD valuation. The latest funding round was led by Meritech Capital, which also led the Series B round last July, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, BoxGroup, and Boldstart Ventures, Clay said in a LinkedIn post announcing the latest raise.
Clay claims its roughly 100-person team is serving more than 5,000 customers, including OpenAI, Canva, and Anthropic,.
In a blog post announcing the raise, Clay co-founder and CEO Kareem Amin added that the funding from Clay’s Series B “remains untouched,” but the momentum from the company’s 6x growth in 2024 prompted its existing investors to “double down.”
The funding announcement came one day after Clay made its first-ever acquisition, absorbing New York-based workflow automation platform Avenue for an undisclosed amount.
Clay was launched in 2017 by two McGill University graduates and repeat entrepreneurs, Amin and Nicolae Rusan, looking to make computer programming more accessible. Rusan, who has since left the company, is Canadian, while Amin—who is originally from Egypt—came to Canada to attend McGill before moving to the United States (US).
RELATED: Canadian-founded, New York-based AI startup Clay closes $63-million CAD Series B
In late 2021, Clay began focusing on automating sales and marketing for businesses and brought in head of operations Varun Anand as co-founder. The company now largely competes against the manual customer research and personalized outreach that sales and marketing teams conduct.
Clay claims its platform combines more than 100 integrations and AI agents to help teams find data, from contact information to intent signals, and instantly apply that data across a team’s entire tech stack, from customer relationship managers to data warehouses to email sequencers. Clay says its roughly 100-person team is serving more than 5,000 customers, including software and AI giants like OpenAI, Canva, Anthropic, Ramp, and Rippling.
San Francisco-based Maple VC, led by Canadian-raised general partner Andre Charoo, is Clay’s only Canadian investor. The early-stage venture capital firm, which focuses on Canadian entrepreneurs building in the US, wrote its first cheque into Clay back in 2017 through its first fund. Clay marks Maple’s first Unicorn, Charoo told BetaKit in an email statement.
“We are incredibly proud to be part of an 8-year journey from the very beginning when Clay was just an idea,” Charoo said. “It is also proof of Maple’s strategy that backing founders from Canadian universities lead us to the most cutting-edge opportunities.”
Feature image courtesy Clay.
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Customer research AI startup CEO claims its 6x growth in 2024 prompted existing investors to “double down.”
The post Canadian-founded Clay achieves unicorn status with $57.5-million raise first appeared on BetaKit.
