What is Clay? [Data, Pricing, Partnerships]

Do you ever wish that your CRM felt less like a cluttered and clunky database and more like a tool actually designed to help you sell?

Clay promises to change that with a powerful data enrichment engine built to make prospecting smarter, more efficient, and more personal. 

Keep reading to learn more about Clay’s data, pricing, and how teams are implementing this radical new way to connect with customers. 

What is Clay.com?

Clay is a data enrichment and prospecting platform built to help teams go to market with highly accurate and actionable data that enables them to personalize outreach at scale. 

Boasting customers like OpenAI, Rippling, and HubSpot, Clay closed a Series C round in June 2025, valuing the company at $3 billion. In August 2025, the company announced it had raised an additional $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation.

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in New York City, Clay now has hundreds of employees spread out across the world.

Clay doesn’t offer any data of its own but rather integrates with more than 130 data sources, pulling data from these systems to enrich your CRM records.

Clay data features

• Data sources galore. By integrating with more than 130 data sources, Clay helps sales teams surface and act on data that their competitors don’t even know exists. As a result, reps can build richer profiles and uncover hidden opportunities, speeding past their peers
• Waterfall data enrichment. Leveraging Clay, you can search multiple data providers in one action, enabling you to find phone numbers, email addresses, and other contact data across several different tools. Clay claims this functionality helps customers 3x their data coverage and quality. 
• Automated workflows. Using Claybooks — a library of pre-built workflow automations — teams can create bespoke prospecting processes that enrich leads, score accounts, and even trigger outreach without lifting a finger. For example, you can use Claybooks to verify email addresses, validate website domains, and enrich individual and company data before firing off emails.

Clay.com pros and cons

Clay.com pros

• AI-powered capabilities designed to enrich data automatically, accelerate account research, and otherwise make life easier for GTM teams.
• Rich integrations that enable you to seamlessly connect Clay to the tools your team uses everyday, like Salesforce, Outreach, Salesloft, Gong, and LeadIQ, making it easy to scale data-driven processes.
• Time-savings via workflow automation, giving reps more time to focus on what they do best: closing more deals.

Clay.com cons

• Usage-based pricing can be expensive, with some users saying Clay’s credits system can make billing hard to predict.
• Clay does not have the most user-friendly frontend user experience, and instead mostly has used an API as its main system of design and data delivery. This means that you’ll need a team member who deeply understands how to best integrate their data API into your existing sales tech stack. 
• Third-party data providers may still require you to sign individual agreements, so while Clay has access to over 130+ data systems, not everyone is automatically accessible via a Clay subscription. 

Clay use cases

• CRM enrichment. Clay helps sales and marketing teams maintain a clean and actionable CRM with automatic enrichment via the platform’s robust network of data  providers and AI agents that check and update records automatically with firmographic data, contact info, first-party data, and intent data. In addition to supporting sales enablement, Clay also improves data hygiene with tools that format and clean data to your specifications.

• Lead scoring. Score leads automatically with Clay to determine which accounts to prioritize based on criteria you define. Using AI, you can filter for leads that are closest to your ideal customer profile (ICP), enabling reps to prospect more efficiently. 

• Account research. Clay helps teams accelerate research with Claygent, an AI-powered tool that finds and analyzes all publicly available information on the internet. Ditch manual research by asking Claygent to summarize 10-Ks, determine whether a company is SOC-II compliant, find out whether an organization is hiring, figure out who’s invested in a business, and basically anything else you can think of.

• Personalized outreach. With Clay, sales teams can automate inbound and outbound outreach with highly personalized messaging based on information in your CRM, enabling you to connect with leads with relevant content that aligns with their use case and industry. The platform also offers an AI copywriting tool that helps you draft personalized emails in just a few clicks.

• Signal tracking. Clay lets you track all sorts of signals — including Google reviews, financial filings, website content changes, and tech stack changes — so you can engage leads at the most opportune times. At the same time, you can also monitor social media mentions, track job changes, and receive alerts when high-value accounts visit high-intent pages on your website, similar to what RB2B does. 

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Clay pricing

Clay offers plans for businesses of all sizes, including startups, SMBs, and large-scale enterprises. Currently, subscription tiers for plans paid annually are as follows:

• Free for up to 100 people and company searches (1,200 credits per year)
• Starter ($134/month) for up to 5,000 people and company searches (24,000 credits per year)
• Explorer ($314/month) for up to 10,000 people and company searches (10,000 credits per year)
• Pro ($720/month) for up to 25,000 people and company searches (25,000 credits per year)
• Enterprise (custom pricing) for up to 50,000 people and company searches (custom credits)

Clay credits are the “currency” used to purchase different data points and actions in Clay. The vast majority of actions in Clay are either free, or cost between 1-2 credits. Some data points are more credits as that data may be harder to find — and different third-party data providers may cost more credits than others for the same type of data. For example, they mention mobile phones generally costing more credits, and depending on the provider can cost between 5 and 25 credits. 

You can read more about Clay credits and use their Credit Calculator here. 

How does Clay work?

Clay works by connecting to upwards of 130 data sources and automatically enriching CRM data, ensuring records stays clean and actionable without any manual intervention required. Think of it as a real-time data engine that uses AI to automate workflows and enable personalization at scale.

With Clay, sales teams no longer have to rely on a single data provider. This enables them to find and score leads faster, keep CRM data up to date, and trigger personalized outreach via signals, like job changes and funding announcements.

Getting started with Clay

Thinking about giving Clay a spin? Here’s how to get started:

• Create an account and connect data sources (e.g., LinkedIn, LeadIQ, and Salesforce)
• Import leads from spreadsheets and CRM records
• Enrich your data automatically; Clay fills out missing information about contacts — like roles and company details — giving you a clearer picture of each lead
• Leverage Claybooks, Clay’s library of pre-built workflows designed to speed up prospecting processes like enrichment and lead scoring
• Create custom workflows to fill in the blanks (e.g., “identify all Series B SaaS companies hiring in San Francisco”)
• Score and prioritize leads using rules and filters your define
• Connect Clay with your sales stack to maintain a single source of truth and ensure enriched data flows back to your other tools
• Leverage generative AI to create custom emails and LinkedIn messages at scale, all personalized to the individual contact
• Automate reporting and alerting to enable reps to see real-time updates and act on signals immediately
• Iterate and optimize using data to continuously refine workflows and messaging to boost your numbers

Clay and the rise of GTM engineers

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard a lot of chatter about go-to-market (GTM) engineers, a job which is in high demand today as companies devise new ways to sell more effectively. Blending engineering, operations, and growth functions together, GTM engineers are fueled by data, experts at technology, and laser-focused on revenue optimization.

Historically, GTM teams spent endless hours centralizing data and piecing together workflows. By centralizing data and using automation to ensure it stays accurate, Clay flipped that model around, which ultimately redefined the modern GTM role.

In many ways, Clay is directly responsible for increasing the popularity of GTM engineers. This is rumored to be because their original product was so technical to implement, they created this new role as a way to market their product. While not verifiable, a quick look at GTM engineer job descriptions will have you seeing Clay over and over again. 

Do you need a GTM engineer to get started with Clay?

If you’re thinking about giving Clay a try, you might be wondering whether you need dedicated GTM engineering resources to unlock the full potential of the platform. 

Clay is definitely a complex tool, which means you’ll need someone who has the technical skills required to set up their API into your CRM, sales engagement platforms, and marketing automation tools.

While you might not need to hire someone with the specific title of “GTM engineer,” you’ll get the most out of Clay if you have someone on the team who is:

• Technical at heart and knows their way around every tool in your existing tech stack;
• Data-driven, with deep interest in reading charts, pulling data, and surfacing insights they use to figure out the best way forward;
• Knowledgeable about sales and marketing concepts, which enables them to build systems that support both functions; and
• Curious by nature and laser-focused on problem-solving.

To learn more about GTM engineers, including what they do, why you should hire one, and the top skills to look for, check out this post: What is GTM engineering & why is everyone talking about it?

Clay + LeadIQ = Better together

Here at LeadIQ, we’re super proud to be one of Clay’s top data partners. With our new universal API access, we’re making it easier than ever to get the best global data flowing into your systems.

Together, LeadIQ and Clay give you incredibly accurate and enriched contact data, including mobile phone numbers, verified email addresses, and company information, that you can use to power prospecting workflows and reach the right people with the right message at the right time.

With LeadIQ and Clay powering your sales processes and GTM functions, hitting your numbers has never been easier. Get started with Clay for free today, or reach out to our team to learn more about how you can use Clay and LeadIQ together.