The business of drumming up new business leads is a fairly timeworn process: Identify new prospects, get their contact information and then cold-call or email them until you get in.
But in the age of artificial intelligence, start-ups are promising to automate much of the drudgery, freeing up salespeople for higher-level work. And one of the faster-growing businesses in the field is Clay, a company based in New York.
Clay plans to announce on Tuesday that it has raised $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation, the latest sign that A.I.-enabled upstarts continue to find eager investors looking to buy into the next big thing.
The round was led by CapitalG, an investment arm of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Other participants included Meritech Capital Partners and Sequoia Capital. It comes around six months after the start-up raised money at a $1.25 billion valuation.
At its core, Clay helps sales representatives and marketers find new leads and turn them into customers. But unlike traditional service providers, the eight-year-old company takes a more technical approach that sometimes requires a kind of coding for its A.I. tools to essentially allow users to program its A.I. tools to identify promising business leads and keep tabs on existing customers.
Kareem Amin, Clay’s co-founder and chief executive, said that his company helped one customer search for warehouses in a specific area using Google Maps and tallied the number of occupied outdoor parking spots to identify which businesses were the most promising leads. Such a targeted approach to generating leads, he said, avoids having sales representatives push out even bigger floods of generic marketing pitches.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post Clay, a Sales Tool for the A.I. Era, Raises $100 Million appeared first on New York Times.
