Clarify, the Seattle-based AI startup that has raised more than $22 million to take on Salesforce and other CRM incumbents, has made its first acquisition: San Francisco-based Seam AI.

Seam’s technology monitors buying signals across the web — such as funding rounds, hiring, website activity, and executive job moves — and surfaces them to sales teams. Clarify plans to fold the technology into a new product called Clarify Signals, slated to launch later this year. 

Clarify is led by co-founders Patrick Thompson (CEO) and Ondrej Hrebicek (CTO), who previously co-founded Iteratively, a Seattle data-analytics startup that was acquired in 2021 by Amplitude, the publicly traded digital-analytics company.

Rationale: Clarify says the deal is part of a shift beyond what it calls a “system of record” that tracks what already happened to a “system of awareness” that flags what’s about to happen. 

Thompson said the Seam deal fills a gap in what Clarify’s own AI can pull from the open web, giving the CRM access to proprietary datasets that can’t be reached with a simple search. 

“The value that Seam is providing is typically the information that’s not necessarily easy to get from the web,” Thompson explained in an interview. “It’s the harder stuff to find.” 

Hrebicek said Clarify’s customers have been looking for a bigger and richer dataset — the ability to “look around the corners on who would be a good lead.” 

Deal points: Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Clarify, which had raised a total of $22.5 million in its seed and Series A rounds from investors including U.S. Venture Partners, Gradient Ventures, and Madrona, said it brought in additional funding as part of the deal but did not disclose the amount. 

As part of the acquisition, five Seam employees are joining Clarify, including Seam co-founder and CEO Nicholas Scavone. With the deal, Clarify is adding a San Francisco office alongside its Seattle headquarters. The company now has 30 people total. 

Backstory: Scavone started Seam in 2020 after five years at Okta, where he saw teams accumulate many different sales and marketing systems, with customer data scattered across all of them. 

Seam 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 customers. Existing customers are on hold while the technology is integrated into Clarify, but many have already indicated they plan to move over to the new platform.

Scavone said he had been weighing whether to raise a new round or find a home for the company when he and Thompson, who have known each other for years, began talking about a combination. 

“We’re all going after the same big incumbents here,” he said, explaining that he ultimately decided Seam had a better chance of taking on the market’s dominant players by joining forces with Clarify than as a standalone company. 

In a post announcing the deal, the Seam and Clarify founders said they “realized we weren’t building competing products—we were building different halves of the same future.”

Landscape: Clarify is entering a crowded field. Sales-intelligence platforms like Clay, ZoomInfo, and Apollo already sell third-party data to revenue teams, and 6sense and Demandbase lead the account-based marketing category Seam had been targeting.

Thompson said one edge for Clarify is that signals arrive inside the CRM sellers already use, not a separate dashboard. 

The company was co-founded in early 2024 by Thompson, Hrebicek, and Austin Hay, a marketing-technology operator who served as co-CEO alongside Thompson. Hay departed in September 2025 and is now with Khosla Ventures, per his LinkedIn.

What’s next: Clarify plans to launch Signals later this year, Thompson said, noting that the company is considering raising additional funds in a Series B round early next year. 

Salesforce’s Tableau business has renewed its lease for roughly 114,000 square feet at the Data 1 office building in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, extending its long-term home in the city.

The lease renewal takes effect after the current agreement expires in 2029, according to an announcement Monday first reported by the Puget Sound Business Journal. It marks the largest office lease renewal in Seattle this year.

The renewal continues Tableau’s long association with Fremont, where the company added offices over the years to accommodate its rapid growth before its $15.7 billion acquisition by Salesforce in 2019. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff once said the Seattle region would become the company’s “HQ2” with the Tableau deal.

However, the years following the acquisition brought significant change. Salesforce conducted multiple rounds of layoffs that affected Tableau employees and trimmed its Seattle office footprint as hybrid work reshaped demand for office space.

Former Tableau CEO Mark Nelson also departed in 2024 after leading the business for two years. Before the acquisition, Tableau had grown to about 4,200 employees worldwide, about half of them in the Seattle region. 

Salesforce originally planned to sublease the Data 1 building at 744 N. 34th St., which Tableau opened in 2018. But it then quickly reversed course in 2023, instead choosing to put its nearby Fremont headquarters building on the sublease market.

The Tableau news also comes at a changing time for Fremont.

Last year, Google announced plans to leave its Fremont campus, bringing all of its employees in Seattle together at its South Lake Union campus. At the time, it cited a desire for better collaboration and community. The pending departure has meant a large chunk of prime office space remains available for lease along the Lake Washington Ship Canal.

However, other companies and organizations have discovered the so-called “Center of the Universe.” Chip maker Nvidia recently leased 28,000 square feet of space at The Fremont Lake Union Center building and the global biotech nonprofit PATH last year took over offices formerly occupied by Tableau in Fremont’s West Dock building.

We’ve reached out to Salesforce about the Tableau lease, and we will update this post as we learn more.

UPDATE with statements from Salesforce and Hess Callahan Grey Group:

“Data 1 has been a critical hub for our local employees and customers, and we are thrilled to continue our presence in Fremont,” said Rob McCorkindale, VP of Global Real Estate Portfolio & Transactions at Salesforce. “This renewal underscores our continued investment in the Seattle region and our focus on creating spaces that inspire our people to do their best work.”

“Salesforce has been an exceptional tenant and a valued presence in the Fremont community since Data 1 was completed,” said Mark Grey, partner at Hess Callahan Grey Group. “Their decision to extend their commitment to the building speaks to the enduring appeal of Fremont and the importance of creating great environments for leading employers. Salesforce is an integral part of the neighborhood’s technology ecosystem, and we are proud to continue supporting their long-term presence in Seattle.”