Seattle’s Clarify acquires SF startup Seam AI, join forces to challenge CRM stalwarts – GeekWire
Clarify, the Seattle-based AI startup that raised more than $22 million to take on Salesforce and others in the CRM space, has made its first acquisition: San Francisco-based Seam AI.
Seam’s technology monitors buying signals across the web — such as funding cycles, hiring, website activity, and top job movements — and assigns them to sales teams. Clarify plans to wrap the technology into a new product called Clarify Signals, which is scheduled to launch later this year.
Clarify is led by co-founders Patrick Thompson (CEO) and Ondrej Hrebicek (CTO), who co-founded the Seattle data-analytics startup that was acquired in 2021 by Amplitude, a publicly traded digital-analytics company.
Reason: Clarify says the deal is part of a broader shift from what it calls a “system of record” that tracks what has already happened to an “awareness system” that flags what’s about to happen.
Thompson said the Seam deal fills a gap in what Clarify’s AI can extract from the open web, giving CRM access to proprietary datasets that can’t be reached with a simple search.
“The value that Seam provides is often information that is not easy to find on the web,” Thompson explained in an interview. “It’s very hard to find.”
Hrebicek said Clarify’s customers wanted a bigger and richer data set — the ability to “look around the corner for who’s going to be a good leader.”
Deal points: Financial terms were not disclosed. Clarify, which has raised a total of $22.5 million in its seed and Series A rounds from investors including US Venture Partners, Gradient Ventures, and Madrona, said it brought in additional capital as part of the deal but did not disclose the amount.
As part of the acquisition, five Seam employees are joining Clarify, including Seam founder and CEO Nicholas Scavone. With this deal, Clarify is adding a San Francisco office next to its Seattle headquarters. The company now has 30 people in total.
The backstory: Scavone started Seam in 2020 after five years at Okta, where he saw teams accumulating many disparate sales and marketing systems, with customer data scattered across them.
Seam has raised $7 million including angel funding and a seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners in April 2024. It counts Zapier, GoFundMe, Drata, and Betterment among its clients. Existing customers are on hold while the technology is integrated into Clarify, but many have already indicated they plan to move to the new location.
Scavone said he was considering whether to raise a new round or find a home for the company when he and Thompson, who have known each other for years, started talking about a combination.
“We all follow the same management here,” he said, explaining that he ultimately decided that Seam had a better chance of taking on the best players in the market by partnering with Clarify rather than becoming an independent company.
In a letter announcing the deal, Seam and Clarify’s founders said they “realized we weren’t building competing products — we were building different parts of the same future.”
Landscape: Clarify enters a crowded field. Marketing intelligence platforms like Clay, ZoomInfo, and Apollo are already selling third-party data to revenue teams, and 6sense and Demandbase are leading the account-based marketing segment that Seam has been targeting.
Thompson said one edge of Clarify is that the signals come from within the CRM vendors already use, not a separate dashboard.
The company was founded in early 2024 by Thompson, Hrebicek, and Austin Hay, a sales operator who served as CEO alongside Thompson. Hay left in September 2025 and is now at Khosla Ventures, according to his LinkedIn.
What’s next: Clarify plans to launch Signals later this year, Thompson said, noting that the company is considering raising additional capital in a Series B round early next year.
