00:00Today on Forbes, Clay, a secret weapon for Anthropic and OpenAI, boosts valuation to
00:07$1.3 billion.
00:11When Clay CEO Karim Amin logged off in September 2021 to embark upon a 10-day meditation retreat,
00:18he had the future of his business to think about.
00:21Four years of work on the New York-based startup had seen Amin tinker on a few ideas in pursuit
00:26of a grand vision of making programming more accessible for everyone, developers and non-coders
00:32alike.
00:33But Amin felt like he was at a crossroads.
00:36Clay had landed on a product that functioned as a no-code internal app builder for anyone
00:41in a business, be they an accountant, marketer, or salesperson.
00:45A supercharged spreadsheet connected outside data sources for them in one spot.
00:50Other software helped them manage workflows.
00:53Another allowed them to program in whatever else they wanted.
00:57But with users, one unglamorous application for Clay's software was resonating above
01:01all.
01:02Go-to-market efforts, centered mostly on the spreadsheet part.
01:06There, growth teams responsible for filtering up the best leads to their sales colleagues
01:11were collecting intel like what other software tools prospects were already using, who their
01:16own clients were, and where potential decision-makers used to work.
01:20This wasn't the highest-impact use case that Amin could imagine.
01:24But it was what customers needed, he realized.
01:27Instead of building the biggest possible tool, Clay just needed to build something useful.
01:32Amin told Forbes, quote,
01:33I had this internal pressure of ambition about the kind of impact we could have in the world.
01:38We would switch from one manifestation of the idea to another.
01:42Removing that, paradoxically, has allowed us to potentially realize that ambition.
01:48Narrowing Clay's aperture from a do-anything, horizontal solution to one pointed only at
01:53growth wasn't a small step.
01:56It meant axing the code tool and workflows, and losing clients.
02:00Amin's co-founder and some early employees departed for other startup ideas.
02:05But the result was significant.
02:06An immediate and steady influx of customers, renewed investor interest, and a so-called
02:11overnight success years in the making.
02:15Today, Clay works with more than 5,000 businesses, including AI shops Anthropic and OpenAI,
02:22and software unicorns Canva, Ramp, and Rippling.
02:26After increasing tenfold in the previous two years each, sales were up 6x for 2024,
02:31giving the startup about $30 million in revenue for 2024, at a minimal loss.
02:37Contract sizes run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
02:41Then there's the ecosystem that has emerged around Clay.
02:44Far beyond its own 95 employees, Clay maintains a Slack channel of 18,000-plus users.
02:51More than 90 small consulting agencies make a living, in several instances, more than
02:56a million dollars, helping other businesses use Clay.
03:00Investors who once had to defend their bets on the business are now eager to pour more
03:04funds into Clay.
03:06The most recent?
03:07A new $40 million investment in Clay that values the business at $1.25 billion, more
03:14than doubling its valuation in just six months.
03:18Clay's trajectory to fast-growing unicorn status after years of a slow burn has proven
03:23early backers prescient.
03:25But how Clay uses generative AI, both within its own product and through AI agents used
03:30by customers, makes it stand out as an early success story for businesses looking for real-world
03:36use cases of a new technology that generates dollars, not just hype.
03:41Already handling the licensing and collection of outside, third-party data for customers,
03:46Clay has capitalized on improvements in AI to supercharge those efforts.
03:51Clay's software can now do some of the work for the user, predicting what data points
03:55and patterns might be valuable.
03:58Its AI agent, called Claygent, can take a potentially valuable but complicated question,
04:04such as finding every previously disclosed customer of a company, or every person on
04:09LinkedIn who worked in certain roles at that company over a specific time period, and return
04:14just the results.
04:17For full coverage, check out Alex Conrad's piece on Forbes.com.
04:23This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.
04:25Thanks for tuning in.
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