Clay

Stop building lists manually — let Clay enrich, score, and route your best leads automatically.

Clay is an AI-powered sales intelligence and data enrichment platform trusted by over 300,000 GTM teams including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Rippling. Clay raised $100M, hit a $3.1B valuation, and counts OpenAI and Anthropic as customers. It connects 150+ data providers into a single spreadsheet-style workspace where you can enrich leads, score prospects, and trigger personalized outreach automatically — without jumping between five different tools

Clay is an AI-driven sales intelligence and enrichment platform that plugs into 100+ data sources, AI research agents, and your existing GTM stack to automate list building, data cleanup, enrichment, and outbound workflows — all in one place. Think of it as a supercharged spreadsheet where every column can pull live data from a provider, run an AI prompt, or apply conditional logic. Clay sits on top of your CRM, not instead of it — it does not manage deals, pipelines, or forecasts, but it enriches and cleans your existing Salesforce or HubSpot data, scores accounts and leads based on any signal you care about, and pushes enriched, segmented, high-intent lists into your outbound tools. The result is a sales team that spends zero time on manual research and 100% of its time on conversations. Cheddar UpCheddar Up

How to Get Started with Clay

Go to clay.com and sign up for a free account — you receive 1,200 annual search credits immediately with no credit card required, enough to build and test your first enrichment workflow on a real list.
Create a new table and import your lead list as a CSV, or connect Clay directly to a CRM or Apollo search to pull prospects automatically into your workspace.
Add enrichment columns one at a time — start with company firmographics (size, industry, revenue) before moving to contact data. Build a two-provider waterfall for email enrichment using Apollo as layer one and a secondary provider as fallback.
Add a Claygent column for any data point your providers cannot find — write a specific research prompt asking it to visit the prospect’s company website and return a single piece of intelligence relevant to your outreach angle.
Add an ICP scoring column using conditional logic to rank your leads, then push your top-scored prospects to HubSpot, Salesforce, or directly into your email sequencer via native integration.

Clay vs Competitors

Clay vs Apollo.io Apollo is a self-contained prospecting database — you search for leads within Apollo’s own database and contact them through Apollo’s built-in sequencer. It is faster to get started and requires no technical setup. Clay is fundamentally different: rather than maintaining its own database like traditional providers, it pulls live information from multiple sources simultaneously — including Apollo itself as one of its 150+ providers. If you need one tool that does everything simply, Apollo is easier. If you need maximum data coverage and custom AI research on your specific ICP, Clay’s waterfall approach produces dramatically higher match rates. Navbar Gallery

Clay vs ZoomInfo ZoomInfo is the enterprise incumbent — a massive proprietary database with strong coverage for US enterprise contacts. In B2B SaaS, the annual data decay rate is roughly 22.5% — every month you wait, 2% of your database becomes toxic, which is the core problem with relying on any single database including ZoomInfo. Clay’s waterfall approach combines multiple providers and refreshes data live rather than serving cached records from a static database. ZoomInfo wins on raw database size and enterprise compliance features. Clay wins on enrichment accuracy, flexibility, and the ability to find data points that no structured database tracks. DataNorth

Final Verdict

Clay is worth it for teams with a dedicated GTM engineer, complex multi-step enrichment needs, and a monthly budget above $500. It is not worth it for sales teams without technical support, teams closing deals under $10K, or anyone who needs predictable monthly costs. The waterfall enrichment is the most powerful in the market, Claygent is genuinely useful for bounded research tasks, and the workflow builder can automate things no competing tool can match. Start on the free plan to validate your first workflow before committing — and factor in 4–6 weeks of learning time before expecting full productivity. Start free at clay.com.

Waterfall Enrichment Across 150+ Providers The waterfall enrichment feature pulls data from multiple sources at once — if one provider does not have an email, Clay automatically finds it through another source. In independent testing, Clay hit 78% email match rates across a 2,000-contact test list, compared to 42% from single-source tools. Instead of accepting a 40% coverage rate from any single database, you chain providers in sequence — Apollo fires first, Findymail second, Dropcontact third — and Clay only charges credits for successful lookups, not misses.

Claygent — AI Web Research Agent Claygent is an AI-powered research agent within Clay that acts as a digital SDR — it can visit websites, read 10-K filings, and find specific custom data points like a company’s newest product feature or a CEO’s recent podcast quote that standard databases cannot track. Claygent has already surpassed a billion runs in 2025, proving just how central it has become to modern outbound workflows. It recovers data that every other tool marks as impossible to find.

Sculptor — Build GTM Workflows in Natural Language Sculptor lets you chat with an AI to generate GTM ideas, analyse your data, and build enrichment tables using plain English — no formula knowledge or technical background required. You describe what you want to build and Sculptor configures the workflow structure for you, which dramatically reduces the 4–6 week learning curve that previously made Clay inaccessible to non-technical operators.

Intent Signals and Buying Trigger Alerts Clay monitors buying signals from 3 million+ companies to prioritise outreach — taking instant action when prospects change jobs, visit your website, mention your company online, and more. Rather than sending cold outreach blindly, your team gets alerted the moment a prospect is showing buying intent, which means your emails arrive at exactly the right moment instead of disappearing into an inbox.

Native Sequencer and CRM Sync Clay integrates natively with HubSpot, Salesforce, Lemlist, Instantly, Smartlead, Pipedrive, and more — pushing enriched leads directly into your outreach platform without manual exports. On Growth plan and above, Salesforce and HubSpot sync runs automatically, keeping your CRM updated with fresh enrichment data on a recurring schedule without any manual intervention from your team.

AI Formatting and Data Cleaning Beyond enrichment, Clay uses AI to transform raw data into consistent, clean formats across your entire database. Even formatting and cleaning data is much easier than in Excel — concatenating fields, removing extra symbols, standardising job title formats, and deduplicating records all run as automated workflow steps rather than hours of manual spreadsheet work before your SDRs can start outreach.

RevOps and GTM engineers at B2B SaaS companies who manage complex multi-step enrichment workflows and need waterfall logic across multiple providers to maintain CRM data quality at scale — Anthropic tripled their enrichment coverage by routing all inbound leads through Clay’s waterfall enrichment and automated ICP scoring before syncing to Salesforce. Andreessen Horowitz

Outbound sales teams at companies selling deals above $10K ACV who need deeply personalised outreach based on custom research signals — Claygent’s ability to read career pages, funding announcements, and product launches gives reps context no competitor database can provide.

Marketing operations teams running account-based marketing campaigns who need to build dynamic, high-intent audience segments from first and third-party data combined — Clay has become the orchestration layer for everything GTM at companies like Rippling, helping build an experimentation-driven GTM motion that iterates on ideas and scales what works.

Growth agencies and SDR consultants managing outbound for multiple clients who need a flexible, programmable enrichment engine they can customise per client ICP without rebuilding workflows from scratch each time.

Plan	Price	Credits	Best For
Free	$0/month	1,200 search credits/year	Platform evaluation and very light prospecting
Starter	$134/month (annual)	24,000 search credits/year	Small to mid-sized teams scaling outbound — no CRM integrations
Explorer	$349/month	10,000 credits + webhooks	Growing teams needing advanced enrichment and automation
Growth	$446/month	Higher limits + Salesforce/HubSpot sync	Teams requiring CRM sync and 1,000–2,000 enriched prospects monthly
Enterprise	Custom	Unlimited or very high limits	Large organisations needing custom AI models, SLA guarantees, and dedicated support

The Starter plan supports roughly 200–400 fully enriched prospects monthly and does not include CRM integrations — you need to upgrade to Growth for Salesforce and HubSpot sync. Annual billing saves approximately 10% across all plans. Navbar Gallery

Unlike traditional developer platforms, Clay does not offer a standard, public inbound API to programmatically query their internal database or manage your workspace infrastructure. Instead, Clay functions as a data aggregation and automation engine designed to connect with external APIs.

To interact with Clay programmatically, you can leverage inbound and outbound connections through several methods: [1, 2]

1. Inbound Automation (Treating Clay Like an API)

While you cannot call a traditional endpoint like ://clay.com, you can make Clay behave like an API: [1]

Webhooks: You can send data into a specific Clay table by creating an inbound webhook trigger. Whenever your external app sends a JSON payload to that webhook, Clay will automatically populate a row and execute its pre-configured enrichment waterfall.
Zapier / Make.com: You can programmatically push records into Clay or pull enriched results using integration platforms like Make.com or Zapier.

2. Outbound Integration (The HTTP API Enrichment)

Instead of an inbound developer API, Clay provides an incredibly powerful HTTP API Enrichment node. [1, 2]

Custom API Calls: This feature allows you to query any external web service or proprietary internal company database directly from your Clay tables.
Authentication: You can securely map authentication headers, tokens (e.g., Bearer YOUR_TOKEN), or query parameters inside the Clay HTTP API Integration Panel.

3. Plan Requirements

Feature Availability: Custom outbound HTTP API integration and webhook automation require a paid tier. They are typically unlocked starting on the Explorer/Growth plans ($349+ to $495+/mo) and are not accessible on the Free or basic Starter tiers.
Bring Your Own Key (BYOK): Clay also allows you to plug your own API keys for providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Apollo to avoid burning native Clay credits.

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