Last month, sales automation startup Clay announced its second tender offer in less than nine months. The tender, led by DST Global, will allow employees to sell up to $55 million in Clay shares at a $5 billion valuation.
Clay’s back-to-back tender offers underscore a growing shift among high-growth startups: rewarding employees with liquidity long before an IPO is in sight. As companies stay private longer — and hit major revenue milestones at breakneck speed — secondary sales are becoming a tool not just for retention, but for signaling strength. In Clay’s case, the two tenders followed rapid valuation jumps and a sprint to $100 million in ARR, positioning liquidity as a performance-based reward rather than a prelude to exit.
“Building a generational business is a marathon, and tenders help equity feel real when top talent has options,” said Nick Bunick, a partner at NewView Capital, who noted that as companies stay private longer and talent competition intensifies, tender offers can be a powerful tool for recruiting, morale and retention.
Still, he noted, there tend to be limits. “In the tender offers we’ve participated in, most employees were limited to selling just 10-25% of their vested holdings, and nearly half of founders didn’t sell a single share, signaling long-term conviction,” he wrote via email. “Even modest liquidity can make a big difference, translating to life milestones like a down payment on a first home, a child’s education, or helping a loved one transition into care.”
Clay’s previous tender, led by Sequoia Capital, happened in May 2025 at a $1.5 billion valuation. In between the two tender offers, the startup closed a $100 million funding round at a $3.1 billion valuation. In total, New York-based Clay has raised $206 million in equity since its 2017 inception. It has 300 employees, up from 80 to 90 a year ago, and 14,000 customers.
Tender offers have become more common as an increasing number of startups choose to stay private longer. Other high-profile examples include payments giant Stripe, which has already undergone a few tender offers and is reportedly considering another that could value it at more than $140 billion. Generative AI company Anthropic is also believed to be working on its own tender offer at a valuation of at least $350 billion.
In Clay’s case, the motivation was twofold, according to CEO and co-founder Kareem Amin. The tender offers have served as a way to allow new investors to come in, and for employees to feel like their equity is “real.”
Crunchbase News recently spoke with Amin to dig deeper into the company’s decision to launch not just one but two tender offers in the past nine months. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Crunchbase News: Before we dig into the tender offers, tell us more about what Clay does.
Amin: We help businesses find and grow their best customers. You can think of Clay as an AI go-to-market tool which implements any creative idea you have for sales and marketing.
Go-to-market is just a new name for sales, marketing and customer success — the whole apparatus that helps you find customers and grow them, and implement any idea. Our vision is that in sales and marketing, you need to constantly be doing something different that’s unique for you, different from everybody else. Otherwise, it just becomes noise.
And we let you implement these strategies. It might be something like personalized landing pages to, “Hey, let’s analyze all the video calls with sales calls that you’ve had, figure out why you lost the customer, and put that into Salesforce.” 1 I like to think of it as “like Figma is for designers, Clay is for go-to-market teams.”
So what drove you to do not just one, but two, tender offers over the past year?
It’s interesting actually to think of it as the inverse: Why not do a tender offer?
Two reasons you don’t do a tender offer is either you don’t have the demand, or you think you’ll demotivate the team. Because we’re growing super quickly, we have the demand, and people want to invest in the company because we’re extremely efficient. Our burn is very, very low.
We don’t actually need more primary capital. We haven’t touched the primary capital. So this is a way to allow new investors to come in. This is also a way to bring in new partners without diluting the whole cap table.
It’s also a way for employees to feel like their equity is real. And some employees are having some real-life events. People are getting married, people are having kids, and this allows them to be a little bit more comfortable and do things like buy a house or buy a car. There are a bunch of people who’ve told me they’ve worked in startups for 10 years and never gotten any liquidity, and this is their first opportunity.
People might only stay at a company because they want liquidity if they don’t like the culture — and they’re just withstanding it for the money. But we prefer people to stay because they want to do the work and they see that the value that they’re generating is real. I actually think it motivates the team.
Plus, it makes the ecosystem grow.
When you did the earlier tender offer, did you think you would be doing another one in less than a year’s time?
No, I don’t think that we were. The way I’m thinking about it is [it makes sense to do a tender offer] every time we hit certain milestones. So we hit $100 million ARR really fast (in December). Tender offers are a way to reward the team each time it performs to a level where we get to the next milestone for the company. I think it makes sense to allow some people to get some of the value that they’ve created.
Do you have an exit plan?
Sometimes even investors ask this question. And we don’t. It is nonproductive to think about that. You’re only building this type of company if you want to see how big it can be. I always say it’ll be as big as it wants to be, and as long as there are problems for us to solve for customers. That’s what we should be focused on, and the valuations and the exits, those are things that are a result of that.
The other way to think about it is we’re basically close to being profitable all the time. Like we can choose to become profitable. (The company touts that it was cash-flow positive for parts of 2025, earning more in interest than it burned.) We want to be in a place where we have options.
Going public is a way to fund things so you can do more for customers. So I think whenever I start going down that line, I refocus back on, “Is there work to do for customers? Can we make the product better?” And the answer right now is, yes, we’re nowhere near achieving our mission, which is how we help you finally grow your best customers. And as long as there’s work to do around that, we should keep doing it.
Do you think you’re going to be doing any more tender offers in the near future?
I think as long as we hit the next set of growth milestones, we’ll consider it. We’re still early in this. There are no exits on the horizon.
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