Clay's Creative Rebellion: How an AI Sales Platform Became New York and the Valley's Most Artistic Unicorn
How a $3.1B AI sales platform proved that creativity — not just technology — is the only sustainable competitive advantage
Written by: Paige Bennett Original photography by: Irina Logra
Summary
- Clay built a $3.1B valuation by treating B2B software like performance art: hiring a full-time Claymation artist and "Schemer in Residence" when they had just 20 employees, proving that over-investing in creativity can become your biggest competitive advantage
- The company pioneered a new role called "GTM Engineer": professionals with "ambidextrous brains" who combine creative strategy with technical execution, operating across sales, marketing, and customer service to scale innovative ideas company-wide
- Their hiring philosophy ignores traditional qualifications in favor of creative passion: reading candidates' personal notebooks during interviews and creating roles to fit brilliant minds rather than forcing people into predetermined positions
- Marketing became their differentiator through "spectacular stunts": from hiring Snoop Dogg's personal joint roller for workshops to kung fu fighting lessons at conferences, creating memorable experiences that make B2B marketing feel human
- Clay's three laws of go-to-market prove creativity is the only sustainable moat: be unique (generic outreach is noise), nothing lasts forever (tactics get commoditized), and speed of iteration determines winners (creativity enables rapid adaptation)
Introduction
What’s an artist without the right medium?
Whether it’s Monet and paint or Michelangelo with marble, creatives require the right medium and tools to bring ideas to life. For startups and go-to-market (GTM) strategy, that medium is clay.
We're not talking about the clay like artists use; it’s Clay, an AI-powered GTM company whose playful approach to traditional (and sometimes boring) billboard advertising has paid off big time.
During HubSpot's INBOUND 2025 conference in San Francisco, Clay became the talk of the town as attendees noticed the company’s billboards, which compared famous artists and their iconic media to Clay as a medium for GTM.
With an unconventional approach to advertising, Clay recently raised $100M at a $3.1B valuation by thinking and acting like an art collective, despite being a B2B sales and data platform. Combining creativity with business is an approach that’s proving successful for Clay, and it could be a winning technique for other companies to follow.
Clay’s emphasis on artistry and creativity isn’t a marketing ploy. It’s built into the company’s foundation, and creativity drives everything from product innovation to hiring.
By combining business, AI, and creativity, Clay has taken a unique approach, one that investors are betting big on.
The Art of Business Architecture
The Sol LeWitt Foundation
Clay is inspired by art and creativity from its brand to its marketing and beyond. Even the logo is inspired by artist Solomon “Sol” LeWitt, and Clay has integrated artistic principles to shape the entire business and its processes.
“Creativity and art run through the company's DNA in a lot of different ways,” Varun Anand, co-founder and COO of Clay, said at a breakfast hosted by HubSpot for Startups at INBOUND 2025. “Then we obviously back it up with the money we invest to do it.”
Engineers need a dedicated place to test and scale tactics, a space known as the integrated development environment (IDE). Clay understands this, so they created a company that is fully an IDE, where engineers are able to quickly and fearlessly build and experiment, especially with help from AI, to stand out in competitive markets.
“Go-to-market engineers … have ambidextrous brains. They can think creatively about the business problems, and then they can build the technical systems to execute on them rapidly with AI,” Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Clay, explained at Sculpt, the company’s first conference. “So the world looks like this: instead of individual reps coming up with tactics, you can figure out a system that scales an idea that an SDR [Sales Development Representative] came up with and a workflow that then ends up helping the whole org.”
Creative Infrastructure as Strategy
Creativity is the heart of Clay, which is why the company has invested so much into branding and art, even early in the startup’s journey.
“We probably over-invest in [brand],” Varun said. “It's one of those investments that makes you look good if the company works. But if it doesn't work, then it was a really bad idea because we've wasted all this money on something that doesn’t really matter.”
When the company had just 18 to 20 members on staff, Clay set up a head of brand and established a five-person brand team, which helped build a strong identity.
Today, Clay has a full-time “Claymation” artist (who “takes a lot of vacation”, according to Varun) and a “Schemer in Residence”, Jessica Jin, a long-time friend of Varun who had previously gained attention during a creative protest campaign over university campus gun laws that involved attaching sex toys to college students’ backpacks.
With just 10 to 15 people on staff at Clay, Varun was already asking Jessica to come on board. Now, “her north star is just coming up with creative stunts,” Varun explained.
This level of investment in branding and creativity was a deliberate risk, but it’s paid off for investors and customers. The brand and marketing are unique, and it backs up a solid, disruptive product to boot. As Varun said, the company works, so over-investing in brand worked.
Now, companies think “Clay” when considering GTM tools.
The Physics of Creativity
Kareem's Three Laws of Go-to-Market
According to Kareem, there are three laws of go-to-market that can apply to any business: be unique, nothing lasts forever, and the speed of iteration determines winners.
“You need to be unique,” Kareem said. “Generic outreach is noise. It's the baseline. You have to figure out something specific about your customers, some leading indicator, something special about them that your competitors don't. And at Clay, we call that go-to-market alpha. So, instead of reaching prospects with the same generic message, you get hyper specific.”
But even if you find something that works to scale, it won’t work forever. Companies can’t stagnate.
“Others copy you, or you exhaust your channel. And what was once your unique play quickly gets commoditized into the new status quo. Your message loses its potency over time. Which means you must always keep adapting,” Kareem advised.
And adaptation must be quick, because competitors will also continue to search for that unique element, and they could beat you to the punch. Plus, with ever-shifting markets, slow iteration will keep you behind.
“The only sustainable advantage is your ability to discover new tactics faster than your customers. The only sustainable advantage is your ability to figure things out faster than your competitors and implement them,” Kareem said.
Together, these three laws form a framework rooted in creativity. You can’t be unique or adapt without using imagination and creative problem-solving, and iterating quickly also requires innovation.
Kareem on Creativity and Clay
Read Clay CEO Kareem Amin's thoughts on creativity and Clay's flexibility. Then see a realworld example of Clay in action. (Button will launch an overlay window.)
Creative Use Cases as Competitive Advantage
So, what does creativity as a competitive advantage look like in action? Successful brands are tapping into their imagination and using Clay to outsmart the competition and stand out to customers.
For example, graphic design platform Canva uses a direct approach for outreach by automating social media listening via Clay. Any time a company posts something that doesn’t align with its brand, be it a mismatched color scheme or improper font, Canva’s team will reach out and recommend its own tools to avoid this misalignment in the future.
Built, a real estate cloud platform, identifies payment portals used by different property management companies, then utilizes that information to qualify leads. Then, there’s Verata, which tracks companies with OSHA violations to determine prospects that likely have security needs that it can fulfill.
Clay also has a client that is a logistics staffing company for warehouses of a specific size. To pinpoint potential clients, the company uses Clay to survey warehouses automatically using Google Maps and focus on warehouses based on the number of parking spots and parked cars around each warehouse.
By utilizing the AI-powered tools in Clay, businesses can automate tasks and identify unique data points, then test and iterate rapidly based on the findings. That allows you to hit all three laws of the framework.
“Capturing and acting on these connected data points at scale is what separates meaningful outreach from the noise. It's how you run plays that stand out from your competitors,” Kareem said.
The GTM Engineer Revolution
Coining a New Category
Clay didn’t want its sales teams to lack the technical skills to answer prospect questions, and it didn’t want engineers who couldn’t approach business problems and technical building without creativity.
Instead, the startup sought out professionals with “ambidextrous brains” in a role called GTM engineer. This allows Clay’s team members to combine creative strategy and technical execution to tackle any problem. And, rather than siloing GTM engineers under traditional RevOps or Sales Ops, Clay uses its IDE structure so these pros can iterate company-wide.
This structure isn’t exclusive to Clay. In fact, the co-founders believe this design will be critical for modern GTM teams to stay competitive.
Embedding Creative-Technical Hybrids
Rather than working within one area of the company, Clay’s GTM engineers operate in sales, marketing, and customer service, creating a comprehensive approach to innovation. This setup allows any creative idea to scale from one person to the entire company.
Embedding creativity into technical spaces and vice versa has always been important for business innovation and growth, but it’s particularly critical in the AI era. Automation is easy, but it’s also now ubiquitous. Using AI alone won’t help a company stand out; it will simply keep them competitive. But applying creativity alongside technology and technical skills is what becomes the differentiator.
“Creativity and art run through the company's DNA in a lot of different ways.”
— Varun Anand, co-founder and COO of Clay
Hiring for Creative Misalignment
The Blank Canvas Philosophy
Hiring people who are creative and passionate is more important to Clay than hiring for specific roles.
Varun approaches hiring as a blank slate and as a way of understanding people, not judging them.
To get a better idea of a potential employee and how their mind works, Varun borrowed the principle of “natural curiosity” from Brandon Stanton, founder of Humans of New York, who is often able to dig deep in brief interviews with strangers he meets on the streets of New York City.
Rather than asking standard interview questions, Varun gets to know people in interviews, and when he notices someone particularly bright, he’ll work with that person to find a role that fits. In one instance, an interviewee kept referencing personal notes in her phone and in a physical notebook. With permission, Varun read through the notes during the interview to get a better insight into how her mind worked.
Hiring people who are intelligent and creative rather than just focusing on past job titles may be a little offbeat, but this misfit hiring strategy has helped Clay promote innovative thinking and collaboration that allowed it to scale to success.
Case Studies in Creative Recruitment
As we know from Jessica’s story, Clay is open to unconventional methods of hiring so long as they lead to more brilliant and creative minds on the team. The company has no shortage of case studies on hiring creatively.
Take Izzy, who works in Customer Education at Clay and leads Clay Cohorts, a peer-to-peer learning initiative. Izzy sent in a thorough Clay use case video about a bunny and was proactive in connecting with Kareem at a conference. Varun interviewed Izzy, who had previous experience as a product manager at Samsara, and thought the original customer support role wasn’t a good fit. Instead, he offered Izzy an educational role.
Similarly, Varun interviewed a candidate named Sarah for a customer experience role. He knew she was excited about Clay, but it felt like the CX role at hand wasn’t quite right for her. Instead, he asked about an educational role after interviewing her (and reading through her notes).
“She was like, ‘Actually, I can't believe you asked that because my whole life I wanted to be a teacher and I'd never been able to do it because of the pay and the economics of it,’” Varun shared.
Varun’s executive assistant also exudes creativity. After one week of work, she shared her “nice hacking” strategy with him, explaining how she used Clay for a personal use case to find GMs at luxury hotels and wrote them personalized letters to boost the chance of upgrades when she visits. Another team member, Ivy, used Clay to create a builder that finds tennis courts and coaches, while another team member used Clay to track new content on streaming services, then rank them based on critic scores.
All of these use cases, from hiring employees to seeing how employees use Clay in their personal lives, all underscore what Clay hopes to emphasize: that creativity is at the heart of what it does.
Marketing as Performance Art
The Spectacular Stunt Strategy
For Clay, marketing is anything but boring. By tapping team members with creative and even activist backgrounds, Clay is now rolling out “stunts” to get people talking — and to keep Clay top of mind when potential clients need a great GTM tool.
For instance, during INBOUND week, Clay hired Snoop Dogg’s personal joint roller to host a class on rolling joints. The company also hired a professional to coach on kung fu fighting, then filmed guests performing in their own battle scenes. Then, there was the perfumery workshop with deep dives on smelling and fragrance, and during Dreamforce 2024, Clay had a “spa day” where people could relax after a long day at a conference.
These may seem like publicity stunts upfront, but ultimately, these twists on typical conference workshops and networking events create a lasting impression and break up some of the monotony that can be found in B2B spaces.
“People are people, and you just resonate with them in different ways,” Varun said. “I think it's just finding ways for people to connect that feel human and nice and fun and refreshing, and do things people actually want to do. And yeah, maybe you talked about Clay in the middle.”
Noah Rubin -- editor of Snoop Dogg's cookbook and best-selling author of "Art of the Roll" -- conducted Clay's joint rolling workshop.
Building in Public as Theater
Right now, you’re reading about how Clay approaches marketing, sales, technical building, and even hiring. You can visit the company’s or the founders’ LinkedIn pages to learn more about what’s going on, or visit the company’s YouTube page for a peek behind the curtain.
Clearly, Clay is not one to shy away from building in public. Like a performance art piece, Clay is open and vulnerable as it builds from scrappy startup to unicorn, and that can bring copycats.
But don’t let the fear of imitation stop your own creativity. Clay remains confident — and stands firm in the law of adaptation — that it can always out-execute the competition. When others copy, Clay pivots. It’s able to do so because creativity is so ingrained in every facet of the company.
Product as Creative Expression
From Spreadsheet to Sculptor
Clay may have invested in creativity early on, but it didn't always have the focus it needed to redefine its industry.
In fact, Varun said the company used to describe itself as “a spreadsheet that would fill itself,” but without a particular audience.
“I think that really reflected a lack of commitment and a lack of focus,” Varun said. “There was a moment where we were like, ‘OK, let's commit, and where should we commit to?’”
So, the founders started talking to people and found the most pull from cold email marketing agencies, which helped them begin to narrow into a more targeted audience. They let curiosity lead the way, ultimately taking them to enterprise clients and developing a product that solves specific pain points as a full data enrichment tool.
On the product side, Clay developed Sculptor, an AI-powered copilot where companies can build tables and workflows through chat. By emphasizing a natural language interface, customers don’t have to be prompting pros to use Sculptor effectively. This allows AI to automate the work, while the user can focus on the creative side — a far cry from just a spreadsheet that fills itself.
The Compound Effect
By reducing technical challenges and focusing on creativity, both within the brand and for customers, Clay’s innovative efforts are experiencing a compound effect.
Earlier this year, Clay surpassed one billion runs of Claygent, its AI research agent. By the end of the year, Claygent is on track to reach two billion runs.
Incorporating more creativity into the business has helped Clay reach more customers, and designing tools with creativity in mind has further provided better results to those customers. It becomes a cycle, where investing in more creativity allows for more unique plays. More unique plays offer a stronger competitive advantage, in turn bringing in more revenue and allowing for more investments in creativity.
Conclusion: The Creative Imperative
Why This Matters Beyond Clay
Clay is making headlines (including here) for its commitment to innovation.
But the company can’t be the only one to embrace creativity. Creativity is the only sustainable moat. Whether a pandemic hits, the market wobbles, or a competitor copies you, you have to be able to adapt and iterate — and quickly.
Varun referenced “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned” by Kenneth Stanley as a lesson for Clay and other startups. Clay didn’t become successful by planning to be a huge success. Instead, it focused on curiosity and creativity as its business infrastructure, and that gave the company the flexibility to grow and change.
The Ultimate Paradox
As part of its creativity and curiosity, Clay’s founders didn’t follow traditional B2B playbooks and guidelines. From following curiosity over a strict strategy to investing heavily in branding to hiring artists and creatives before engineers, Clay took major risks.
Maybe you can’t plan for greatness, but by taking the risks it did, Clay somehow seems to have known it was destined for success.
Risks don’t always pay off. But Clay stands as an example that taking risks with innovation and passion can offer a big return on your investment.
Closing Thought
As it said on Clay's billboards: “Every artist has their medium, go-to-market has Clay.”
Clay has become a major player in GTM, and that’s not luck or algorithms. The companies that will scale successfully are those that treat business like art, rather than getting caught up in all the technicalities.
Where Clay really thrives is that it doesn’t just offer data enrichment; it offers spaces for creativity where creativity isn’t always allowed. It’s a lesson for future startups to learn: embed creativity, humanity, curiosity, and passion into what you do, and the rest will follow.
“I don't have a great answer for how people can be more curious,” Varun said. “I think they just have to want it, and they have to create space for it and apply it in their day-to-day.”
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Author: Paige Bennett
Paige is a freelance editor and writer with nearly a decade of professional experience covering marketing, sales, and lifestyle content. Her work appears on the main HubSpot blogs, Business Insider, Better Homes & Gardens, Reader's Digest, and more. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Ohio University, specializing in gender studies and sustainability. Fun fact: as of this writing, she has sustained a 1,200+ day meditation streak (we can only imagine what her Duolingo streak must be!)
