Clay

What is Clay?

Clay is a GTM engineering platform that unifies data enrichment, prospect research and outbound workflow automation. Its core model is a spreadsheet-style workspace where each row is a prospect or account and each column can pull from one of 150+ data providers, a native integration, or an AI research agent ("Claygent"). Around that workspace, Clay has grown into four connected layers: Audiences (a unified data layer that connects your CRM, data warehouse, signals and 200+ provider marketplace), Signals (job changes, promotions, hires, company news, social activity and web intent), Workflows (visual automation with code nodes and scheduled runs), and execution (a native email Sequencer, ad-audience sync to LinkedIn/Meta, and an MCP server that puts prospect data inside AI tools like ChatGPT).

Where Clay sits in the stack: it is neither a CRM nor a sequencer-first tool. It sits above both, sourcing and preparing data in whatever systems you already run, then pushing qualified, enriched leads into HubSpot, Salesforce, Outreach, Salesloft, Instantly, Smartlead or Lemlist. Clay Labs (Brooklyn, NY, founded 2017) reported a $100M Series C at a $3.1B valuation in August 2025 (led by CapitalG) and a $5B employee tender valuation in January 2026, per TechCrunch. The company claims ~$100M ARR and 500,000+ GTM teams; these are vendor figures, not independently verified.

The practical way to think about Clay: it replaces the collection of browser tabs, spreadsheets and Zapier zaps a RevOps team otherwise assembles to answer "who should we contact today, and what do we know about them?" The tradeoff for that flexibility is real: someone on your team has to build and maintain the tables, and cost is usage-based rather than a flat per-seat number.

Pricing

Pricing last verified: September 10, 2026 (clay.com/pricing). Clay's pricing has two meters, and confusing them is the most common complaint about the product:

• Actions measure platform work Clay does for you — running enrichments, calling AI models, pushing data to other systems, exporting. Actions start at less than $0.01 each and get cheaper at scale. They reset each billing cycle and do not roll over.
• Data Credits buy the data itself from Clay's marketplace (emails, phone numbers, company data across 150+ partners). Credits start at $0.05 each and get cheaper with volume. Credits roll over up to 2x your monthly amount on Launch/Growth. Credit top-ups carry a 30% premium.

Failed enrichments are not charged credits or actions, per Clay's pricing FAQ. If you bring your own API keys for a data provider or AI model, you skip Data Credits entirely and only pay Actions.

Note on the numbers: Clay's pricing cards show "starts at $167/mo" (Launch) and "$446/mo" (Growth) with annual billing selected, while its FAQ text cites $185 and $495, the difference appears to be monthly vs annual billing. Treat these as starting tiers; both plans step up through higher action/credit volumes.

Details that matter:

• Phone enrichment is paid-plan only (not in Free).
• CRM auto-sync, data warehouse sync (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Postgres, Fivetran), HTTP API integrations and webhooks require Growth or above.
• The Clay Public API is listed as Enterprise in the plan comparison FAQ.
• AI pricing is dual-mode: ~80% of models cost flat credits per task; token-intensive models (e.g. GPT-5.1, Claude Sonnet) are billed at actual token cost with no markup, shown with a "~" estimate per row.
• Enterprise requires an annual commitment with custom pricing.
• Credit rollover: banked up to 2x your monthly amount on Launch/Growth; Enterprise rolls over up to 15% of annual credits on renewal.

How Clay works

A typical Clay workflow follows this shape:

1. Source rows: search Clay's own database with filters, import from CRM or a CSV, connect a data warehouse, or trigger on a Signal (e.g. a contact changes jobs).
2. Enrich columns: each column calls a data provider, a waterfall, or a Claygent prompt. Waterfalls query multiple providers in order until a field (like a work email) is filled, and only bill what succeeds.
3. Filter and score: use formula columns, code nodes, or AI columns to qualify, score and route rows.
4. Act: push rows to your CRM, a sequencer campaign, an ad audience, a webhook, or export them.
5. Schedule or trigger: run tables on a schedule, or wire signals to fire workflows automatically when something changes.

Key features

Waterfall enrichment

Clay's signature feature. Instead of betting on one contact database, a waterfall column tries provider after provider — "find a work email: try Hunter, then Findymail, then FullEnrich" — and stops at the first hit. Because 150+ providers are reachable in one table, coverage on hard-to-find fields is the main reason teams choose Clay. The tradeoff: every successful lookup consumes Data Credits, so waterfall costs scale with how selective your providers are.

Claygent (AI research agents)

Claygent is an AI agent with web access that answers per-row research questions: "does this company have a usage-based pricing page?", "find this person's position on the company's about page", "classify this company's ICP fit 1–10 based on employee count, industry, tech stack and growth signals." As of September 2026 Clay reports 5 billion+ Claygent runs (vendor figure). Agents are built in Claygent Builder with a prompt helper (Sculptor), support tool connections, and expose a full reasoning trace per run. Account Research Agents extend this to always-on monitoring of a book of business with CRM and call context.

Signals

Clay monitors job changes, promotions, new hires, company news, social listening and (on Growth+) web intent, and can trigger workflows when a signal fires — the classic "your champion just moved companies" play. Signal types are plan-gated: job change/company news/social arrive at Launch; web intent and webhook-triggered signals require Growth.

Audiences

Audiences is Clay's unified data layer: it combines CRM records, warehouse data, first-party activity and third-party enrichment into addressable segments inside Clay. On Growth+ it also powers CRM auto-sync and ad-audience pushes; Enterprise gets unlimited search and imports.