Clarify, a Seattle startup building an AI-powered alternative to Salesforce, bought San Francisco-based Seam AI on Tuesday, July 21.

The deal matters for Seattle's startup ecosystem because of who is behind it. CEO Patrick Thompson and CTO Ondrej Hrebicek are serial founders. They co-founded Iteratively, a Seattle data-analytics company that Amplitude acquired in 2021. Before that, Hrebicek co-founded Syncplicity, a file-sharing startup EMC bought in 2016.

Clarify represents their third venture together, launched in early 2024.

Five Seam AI employees are joining Clarify, including Seam co-founder and CEO Nicholas Scavone.

Clarify is adding a San Francisco office alongside its Seattle headquarters and now employs 30 people total.

Seam's technology monitors buying signals across the web, tracking funding rounds, hiring activity, website visits, and executive job changes, then surfaces them to sales teams.

Clarify plans to fold that capability into a new product called Clarify Signals, with a launch planned for later in 2026.

Scavone started Seam in 2020 after five years at Okta, where he watched sales teams scatter customer data across dozens of systems. Seam raised $7 million total, including a seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners in April 2024, and counted Zapier, GoFundMe, Drata, and Betterment among its customers.

Those accounts are on hold during the technology integration.

Clarify said many existing Seam customers have indicated they plan to move to the new platform.

Clarify has raised $22.5 million across seed and Series A rounds from U.S. Venture Partners, Gradient Ventures, and Seattle-based Madrona.

The competitive field is crowded. Clay, ZoomInfo, and Apollo already sell third-party sales intelligence. 6sense and Demandbase lead the account-based marketing category Seam had targeted.

Thompson's pitch: buying signals arrive inside the CRM sellers already use rather than in a separate dashboard.

Clarify's website listed two open roles as of Tuesday, July 21.