🔥 up to announce @boldstartvc Fund VII $250M to back bold technical founders building the autonomous enterprise. From Inception. Before the world believes. It always starts with an idea that feels insane… until it isn’t. 🎥👇🧵

SF mornings ☕️ talking software factories, agent identity and intent with @guypod @ianlivingstone

Today at Sculpt, we showed 2,500 people from 30 countries the future of @Clay, the self-learning revenue engine. These are the building blocks for that engine: 🧵

Today we're announcing our Series D: $115M raised, led by @Wellington_mgmt, at a $7.1B valuation. Fundraises are good moments to reflect on our journey so far. Act 1 was aggregating the best data. Act 2 was building the GTM infrastructure (audiences, workflows, agents) to run any campaign on top of that data. Now we are entering Act 3: creating the self-learning revenue engine to grow every business. @Clay will predict the next best action for your business and help you take it. Sometimes, that might be a tweak to a subject line or ad copy. Other times, it might be a suggestion to change your marketing strategy, train your sellers differently, or even build a different product based on lost deal patterns.

Black Hat energy ⚡️ Nothing better than bringing investors, founders and CISOs together in Vegas. Thanks to our friends at @EvolutionEquity, @awscloud, @GlilotP and @ValleyBank for co-hosting with us

Today, @Clay is launching Functions. And when we thought who should announce this to the world ... who better than arguably the best pizza chef in NYC? What are functions? Well, they're kind of like a recipe. OK I know it's a bit of a stretch but hear us out. Whether you're slinging pizzas or GTM workflows, it really does start with the right formula. You don't just make the world's best pizza dough once and then wing it from there - you need a recipe you can count on time and time again. Think of functions as your thin crispy base - the core Clay workflows you've been rebuilding manually from memory (waterfall logic, scoring models, signal sequences). Define your data once. Your team runs on it forever. Edit it centrally and it auto-updates everywhere. PS Lucali is near and dear to my heart. I went on one of my first dates with my now-wife there (and actually sat next to Beyonce and Jay-Z! Just two couples with great taste dining side-by-side!). Learn more here: clay.com/blog/functions

Your coding agents inherit your credentials and your permissions. No identity system in the stack can tell the difference between you and the agent acting in your name. Today: Keycard for Coding Agents 🧵

Today @Clay is announcing our second employee tender in just 9 months at a $5B valuation. Employee tender offers are rare at private tech companies, and repeat tenders at this frequency are rarer still. Under the traditional model, employees take on years of risk with no path to liquidity until an IPO or acquisition. We’re not building Clay that way. We believe that companies hitting their milestones should offer equity as part of people’s journey, not just at the end. And we want all our employees to benefit meaningfully from the value they create. There are two reasons companies don't do tenders: 1) you don't have the demand for your stock; 2) you think your team will get demotivated if they sell their shares. Re: the first -- I can't help you much there (but maybe DM me and I can do a video consulting on your biz problems). On the second -- in our experience, the opposite happens! When people feel trusted, supported, and happy, they stay longer and build with more conviction - just check out our Glassdoor reviews (p.s. we’re hiring!). Our teams are more loyal, energized, and motivated to make a big outcome happen because they know we care about doing right by them. The tender will allow employees to sell up to $55M of Clay shares at a $5B valuation, and is led by DST Global, with participation from @conviction, @AvraCap, @OpCo_VC and @Frontlinevc, alongside a stellar roster of angels and customers, including Stripe's @chughesjohnson, Figma CMO @SheilaVashee, Superhuman CEO @shishirmehrotra, and product leader @lennysan. Thank you to our team, community, and customers for making this milestone possible. We're hyped for the journey ahead! → Check out The New York Times feature by @m_delamerced: nytimes.com/2026/01/28/busin…

🙏🏻To our founders, LPs, and co-investors, thank you for building with us in 2025. The market is getting tougher, but the best teams are just getting started 📈 Looking ahead to 2026. Full recap: boldstart.vc/news/boldstart-…

Today we hit $100M ARR at @clay. It took us six years to go from $0-1m, then two years to go from $1-100m. I’m going to walk you through the 6 biggest GTM bets that got us here. $100M ARR may be the headline, but I’m most proud of how we accomplished it: we’ve never churned an enterprise customer, have >200% enterprise NRR, every dollar we invest grows 15x (a ratio that has tripled in recent years), and we’ve created a culture of creativity and belonging (with a perfect Glassdoor score to match). Note: -We are a product-driven company. Without that foundation and a unique POV on the market, none of this would work. -Our GTM approach is authentic to us. This isn't a plug-and-play framework. Greatness comes from doing what only you can do. Here are the big bets that worked for us: 1. Building a self-serve motion through reverse demos We originally had a product that nobody could use. It took us 8 calls to sell a $200/mo product! Reverse demos were key to bringing that to zero. Customers would share their screen, and we’d use Zoom annotations to solve their problem in 30mins. They accomplished something real, learned how to use Clay, and we got so much UI feedback that we immediately applied to the product. 2. An irrational investment in brand Most B2B startups treat brand as a post-PMF investment. We flipped that. We bought Clay(.)com and hired a claymation artist before we had revenue. Our Head of Brand was employee #18. These choices felt irrational but they’re authentic to us and reflect our identity. Now it’s a moat. 3. Switching to usage-based pricing We were the first GTM company to offer usage-based pricing. Our customers were shocked we didn't charge per seat and our investors thought we were leaving money on the table. But we're a product built for efficiency. Usage-based pricing helped us target more technical users and enabled our land-and-expand motion. 4. Building an agency motion to generate UGC on LinkedIn Cold email agencies were our first customers. They posted about Clay organically to position themselves as experts and attract clients. We pounced on this and enabled them. This sparked a self-perpetuating cycle: new people discover Clay through that content, join, create their own, and earn recognition too. 5. Unconventional hiring 50% of our GTM and G&A teams are doing their job for the first time. This is how we bring creativity into our company and think differently. We’ve hired farmers, physicists, archaeologists, magicians in new roles. We look for product passion, customer empathy and technical curiosity, then teach the mechanics. 6. We created a new career path & economy: GTM Engineering There are now thousands of open GTME jobs and hundreds of agencies built around it. Many first-time entrepreneurs have already built 7-figure businesses on top of Clay. Our community, with clubs in more than 70 cities, is our force multiplier, and tells us more about impact than any metric ever could. - All of these bets show we’re not racing anyone. We spent six years figuring out what and how we wanted to build. In an era of overnight successes and growth at all costs, it turns out that taking time to build something authentic can create a business with bigger impact & more growth than you'd think. Our creativity remains our greatest alpha. That will continue to show up in how we do our work, who we hire, and in our boldest bets coming up next year.

Join us @clay ! We’re hiring for all roles I’m specifically hiring former founders for our enterprise engineering team