Startups

Clay reaches $7 billion pre-money valuation as Wellington leads new round

The AI sales and marketing platform's valuation has more than quadrupled since early 2025, marking AI-native outbound tooling as a durable venture category.

By Giulia Donatello· Startups & funding·2026-09-01·3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Campaign Creators — Sales team reviewing charts and data during a strategy meeting

Clay is raising a new round led by Wellington Management at a $7 billion pre-money valuation, Axios reported on August 31, 2026, a figure that has more than quadrupled since early last year and confirms AI-native outbound tooling as one of the few venture categories the market is now willing to underwrite at infrastructure prices.

The trajectory is the story. Clay closed a $100 million Series C led by CapitalG on August 5, 2025, at $3.1 billion. Five months later, on January 28, 2026, DST Global led a $55 million employee tender at $5 billion, the company’s second such tender in nine months. Wellington’s round marks the third repricing in roughly a year.

The revenue side has kept pace. Clay reached $150 million in ARR by May 2026, up from $108 million at year-end 2025, after tripling ARR to $100 million the previous year and posting 500% growth in 2024, per Sacra and TechCrunch. Enterprise net revenue retention sits above 200%. The customer roster, disclosed at the Series C, reads like a directory of AI-era buyers: OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Canva, Intercom, Rippling. Clay, founded in 2017, now employs more than 300 people, serves over 14,000 customers, and has raised roughly $277 million across seven rounds.

What Wellington is buying is a platform that integrates more than 150 data sources and runs AI research agents against them, from monitoring competitor mentions to analyzing satellite imagery of warehouse parking lots. In March 2026 the company restructured its pricing from a single-credit model to a dual meter of Data Credits and Actions, retiring the $800 Pro tier in favor of a $495 Growth tier and a $185 Launch tier, cutting native enrichment costs by 50 to 90%. Expansion pricing, not gatekeeping pricing.

CEO Kareem Amin told TechCrunch at the time of Clay’s first tender that the structure was designed so “the gains don’t just accumulate to a few people.” It’s a line worth reading twice. Employee tenders at this cadence are retention infrastructure, not founder windfalls, and they only work when late-stage sheets keep clearing. Wellington just cleared the next one.

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