Partner spotlight: The Kiln

The Kiln spent the last few years becoming one of the most respected Clay partners in B2B — the GTM-engineering shop teams called when a build was too custom for anyone else. In January 2026, 2X acquired it. That’s the part worth paying attention to.

The Kiln is an OutboundSync agency partner, and the acquisition raises the ceiling on what they can take on — so it’s a good moment to look at who they are and what just changed.

Who built it: Mathias Powell and Patrick Spychalski

The Kiln was founded in Brooklyn by Mathias Powell and Patrick Spychalski, and built into a leading Clay partner the hard way — by taking the GTM-engineering work other shops turned down. Their ethos shows up in how they describe it: “custom is our comfort zone,” and they invest “deep time, not just hours,” keeping each engineer on only a handful of clients at once. The line they kept coming back to: build systems that let a team sell, instead of spending all day preparing to sell.

That reputation — deep Clay expertise, bespoke builds, real engineering rather than slideware — is what made them worth acquiring.

Now part of 2X

In January 2026, 2X acquired The Kiln. 2X is the category leader in marketing-as-a-service: a roughly 1,300-person firm spanning the U.S., Malaysia, and the Philippines, backed by Recognize Partners and Insight Partners, and named one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S. by both the Inc. 5000 and the Financial Times in 2025. It is led by co-founder and CEO Domenic Colasante.

The logic of the deal is a gap in the market. Clay’s ecosystem of 100+ boutique agencies is great for SMBs, but enterprise buyers need delivery infrastructure, proven frameworks, and organizational stability alongside the innovation. The Kiln had the innovation; 2X brings the scale to deliver it at the enterprise level. Together they push past lead gen into full go-to-market orchestration — running the whole system from identifying in-market accounts to enriching contacts, automating outreach, and executing across marketing, the GTM tech stack, and sales and revenue operations.

“Traditional marketing providers deliver demand generation and content,” said Domenic Colasante, 2X’s CEO and co-founder. “We now orchestrate the complete GTM system — across marketing functions, the full GTM tech stack, and into sales and revenue operations.”

From The Kiln’s side, co-founder Patrick Spychalski put it plainly: “We’ve built our business helping clients unlock revenue through GTM Engineering but scaling that expertise to serve enterprise clients requires infrastructure we couldn’t build alone.”

What that unlocks

For clients, the practical change is range. The Kiln’s three motions — outbound (automated sequences, lead qualification, TAM mapping, deliverability, social outreach), marketing and growth (inbound enrichment, account scoring, paid-ads audiences, event automation), and RevOps (CRM hygiene, enrichment, lead scoring) — now sit inside a delivery organization built to run them at enterprise scale, with one partner for both strategy and execution.

The combined picture:

The fit with OutboundSync

None of this changes the part that touches us. The Kiln builds on the platforms OutboundSync supports — Clay, Smartlead, HeyReach, HubSpot, and Salesforce — and OutboundSync lands that outbound activity on the right records in the CRM. If anything, the orchestration story raises the stakes on clean CRM data: the more of the funnel one partner runs, the more it matters that every touch shows up where the revenue team actually works.

You can follow The Kiln’s own playbooks in their GTM Cookbook newsletter, or reach the team below.