Customer story – Clay

Clay scales lookalike matching with Ocean's API

How Clay embedded company and people lookalikes into their platform — running 1.5M+ actions without building any ML infrastructure.

Customer story

At a glance

Customer Clay — workflow platform for modern go-to-market teams

Integration Ocean API (Company & People Lookalikes)

Impact 1.5M+ actions run (and growing)

Favourite People Lookalikes

"In total now it's been like 1.5 million actions run."

— Stefan Kollenberg

The challenge

Smarter expansion lists, without the ML team

Clay's customers wanted smarter expansion lists, not just more filters. Traditional firmographic filters (industry codes, employee bands) rarely map cleanly to nuanced ICPs.

Clay needed a solution to:

Generate high-quality lookalikes for both companies and people
Maintain product velocity without spinning up an ML team
Fit naturally into Clay's credit system and workflows

"We'd heard really good things about Ocean and the quality of your lookalikes… quality, customer feedback, flexibility of the team, and API support influenced our decision."

— Stefan Kollenberg

"We didn't do a detailed one-to-one comparison initially; later looked at others but held off."

— Stefan Kollenberg

Build vs. buy

Why Clay partnered with Ocean

Building data and ML in-house means high engineering costs, months of setup, and constant maintenance. Partnering with Ocean eliminates that overhead — no ML team needed, faster time to market, and proven, high-quality data via API.

"Working with a trusted partner saves a ton of engineering time and ongoing AI costs. Speed and quality are higher out of the gate."

— Stefan Kollenberg

The solution

Company and People Lookalikes, built into every workflow

Clay integrated Company Lookalikes and People Lookalikes. What changed for Clay users:

Skip steps in prospecting — Go straight to qualified people

Smarter lists — Expand beyond rigid filters into ICP-adjacent targets

Prioritization — Generate ranked accounts & contacts that mirror past wins

"The person lookalike feature is especially powerful—you can skip multiple steps in prospecting and go straight to the ideal people you want."

— Stefan Kollenberg

Outcomes

Results & impact

1.5M+

actions run via Ocean API (and growing)

Clay's customers — expand target lists beyond traditional firmographic filters

Clay shipped — new capability without building ML infrastructure

"Customers use it to expand their list building and sourcing — especially when their ICP doesn't fit into traditional filters."

— Stefan Kollenberg

Quality

How quality stays high

Clay improves results by prompting users for the most predictive inputs (roles, skills, outcomes). This guidance, combined with Ocean's models, ensures consistently higher-quality matches.

"Quality is best when users input the right signals… guide them to fill in what they actually care about."

— Stefan Kollenberg

Developer experience