My exact Clay and Instantly workflow for cold emailing funded startups within 48 hours of their announcement
clay_instant_kate · 2026-07-29 · 930 views
Funded startups are one of the best cold email ICPs you can work. They have fresh capital, pressure to deploy it, and leadership teams actively looking for tools and services to help them scale. The problem is timing. A startup that raised six months ago has already been contacted by every vendor in their category. You want to reach them in the first two to three weeks after announcement.
Here is the exact workflow I run to hit funded startups within 48 hours of their funding announcement.
Step 1: Clay table setup. I use Clay's native Crunchbase enrichment to pull companies that received funding in the last seven days. I filter for Series A and B rounds in B2B SaaS. I run this pull every Monday and Thursday.
Step 2: People enrichment. For each company I use Clay's Clearbit enrichment to find the VP of Sales, Head of Growth, or relevant decision maker. I waterfall through three providers if the first fails. I usually land a verified contact for 65 to 70 percent of companies.
Step 3: Email verification. Every contact goes through ZeroBounce inside Clay before it exits the table. Catch-all and risky addresses get filtered out automatically.
Step 4: Push to Instantly. Clay exports clean contacts directly to my Instantly campaign via their native integration. Contacts land in the sequence and emails go out the same day the pull runs.
The subject line for this ICP: Saw the [round type] announcement. Simple, relevant, and specific to something that happened in the last week. Reply rate on this campaign has held at 6.1 percent over the last four months running on PuzzleInbox Google Workspace inboxes.
The whole setup runs in about two hours per week. Fresh-funded startups are time-sensitive. Build the workflow fast or the window closes before you even start sending.