Clay is the Most Undervalued Startup in AI @ a $3B Valuation

I’m probably a broken record at this point with my fandom of Clay.

It’s the best GTM tool I’ve seen in my career to embed AI into any sales/marketing workflow, provides a crazy amount of leverage to any team, and feels like they’re truly building a movement I haven’t seen in quite a while in software.

One of our first articles for GTMBA was about our love for Clay, explaining how we were using it at our current startup, as well as our fascination with the term “GTM engineering” that they pioneered in early 2024.

It seems that we’re not the only ones, as the VibeScaling team was in SF this week for Clay's first conference, Sculpt, with thousands of other fans of the tool/community they are building.

We've embedded Clay in every one of our clients (from companies like Arcade.dev to Decagon to countless others).

The bottom line (IMO) is that Clay is the most undervalued startup in tech @ a $3B valuation & as my buddy Brendan would say, they’re eating the GTM world.

If you aren't using them in GTM, you are falling behind - 3 reasons below why we’re huge fans & takeaways/thoughts from the conference 👇🏻:

1) They’ve been awesome partners for us @ VibeScaling

Whether helping our clients create leverage in GTM or hosting our NYC-based event series at their HQ in Flatiron NYC, they’ve been super supportive in building out the community we’re trying to build in NYC/SF.

2) They will be the first platform to combine best-in-class signals, enrichment, and outreach, all in one

One huge announcement from the conference is that they are formally moving into signals (as well as some other awesome launches below).

One of the big knocks on Clay was that they didn't have the signals natively, and that you had to go out of the platform to get these signals (with a tool like Common Room), run webhooks into Clay, and then ship out your messaging to another outreach tool (like HeyReach or Instantly).

We were able to overcome this challenge with multiple tools; see this deep dive I spun up with Brendan Short regarding web intent to auto-messaging play using RB2B, Clay, and HeyReach.

No longer do you need to move off of Clay/use other tools with these latest announcements from Sculpt (5 outlined below).

If I were other sales tech signal platforms, I’m definitely getting a little worried.

1) Sculptor - AI Copilot

Build workflows in natural language and query your Clay tables like a database. Ask for "Series B companies in NYC with 3+ site visits" and get instant results.

2) Audiences 

Combines website visits, social engagement, fundraising events + CRM data in one view. No more piecing together buyer journeys across a bunch of tools.

3) Native Outreach

Campaign execution built directly into Clay with AI personalization and deliverability. Intent signal → personalized campaign in minutes.

4) Claygent MCP Integration

Now connects to any tool - Salesforce, Gong, Google Docs. New prompt management lets you test without burning costly credits.

5) Web Intent (Beta)

Track your ICP's website activity directly in Clay - see who's browsing, engagement levels, and person-level data.

This is exactly what I meant about them becoming the centerpiece of every serious GTM team. They're not just adding features - they're systematically eliminating entire tool categories.

Been impressed by how fast they are shipping this tool consolidation into existence.

3) The top GTM teams in AI GTM are using them

From OpenAI to Rippling to Cursor - it seems every top software company is starting to use Clay in a ton of different ways.

Some takeaways I specifically loved from the Cursor keynote:

• Jordan (their COO) calling sales a science/math equation, quite a linear path to get from point A to point B commercially

  • Could agree more, and wrote about why sales is way more of a science than an art

• They use Clay a ton for recruiting, especially ripping a LI sales nav search —> Clay —> outreach

  • Since we have a growing recruiting practice, can confirm this is an awesome use case

• Cursor admitted to not hiring fast enough on the GTM side in the early days

  • It’s refreshing to hear that companies (even the ones that are super dev-focused) are realizing how much of an accelerant a strong GTM team (and doesn’t make the same mistake as Slack)
    

Awesome week - thanks for reading this far.

As a refresher - at VibeScaling, I run (with a few partners) a GTM advisory, GTM engineering, recruiting, and media firm (GTMBA). We mainly focus on pre-seed through series B/C AI-natives.

For anyone interested in learning more about Clay for their company or want to swap notes on GTM - shoot me a note!

Till next time 🫡,

Chris