ClickHouse secures $400M at $15B valuation as AI infrastructure demand surges

Snowflake, Databricks challenger Clickhouse hits $15B valuation | TechCrunch

Database provider ClickHouse secured $400 million at a $15 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, representing about a 2.5x increase from its $6.35 billion valuation last May. The round was led by Dragoneer Investment Group, the startup said, with participation from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, GIC, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. ClickHouse, which spun out from Russian search giant Yandex in 2021, develops database software designed to process the massive datasets required by AI agents. The company competes with Snowflake and Databricks. The company also announced the acquisition of Langfuse, a startup that helps developers track and evaluate the performance of their AI agents. Langfuse competes directly with LangSmith, LangChain's observability platform. ClickHouse database is open-sourced, and it makes money by selling managed cloud services, which saw annual recurring revenue (ARR) grow by more than 250% year-over-year, it said. The company's customers include Meta, Tesla, Capital One, Lovable, Decagon, and Polymarket.

Database maker ClickHouse raises $400M, acquires AI observability startup Langfuse - SiliconANGLE

Database maker ClickHouse raises $400M, acquires AI observability startup Langfuse Open-source database maker ClickHouse Inc. today announced that it has closed a $400 million late-stage funding round at a $15 billion valuation. The Series D investment, which comes about six months after the company's previous raise, was led by Dragoneer. It was joined by GIC, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price and WCM Investment Management. The round follows a year in which ClickHouse's annualized recurring revenue rose by more than 250%. "Major platform shifts ultimately reward the infrastructure companies that sit closest to production," said Dragoneer partner Christian Jensen. "As models become more capable, the bottleneck moves to data infrastructure." A storage device is divided into segments called sectors. Usually, each sector holds a few hundred or thousand bytes. ClickHouse's namesake database places columns in sectors that are immediately adjacent to one another. That approach enables it to perform data analysis tasks such as averaging product prices faster than many competing platforms. ClickHouse also speeds up queries in other ways. When a user searches a large dataset for a specific piece of information, the system avoids looking through sections of the database that don't contain the relevant record. It takes a similar approach to speeding up data modification queries. ClickHouse only updates the specific records that a user wishes to change instead of the entire dataset. The company monetizes the open-source version of its database with a paid cloud version. ClickHouse Cloud, as the service is called, removes the need for customers to manage the underlying hardware or manually install updates. The administrative tasks that it doesn't perform on users' behalf can be automated through integrations with third-party management tools. The company disclosed that its cloud service has over 3,000 customers. Its installed base includes Meta Platforms Inc., Sony Corp., Lyft Inc. and other major tech firms. The company also divulged that it's acquiring Langfuse GmbH, a startup with an open-source tool for monitoring large language models. Companies use Langfuse's software to track the latency and infrastructure usage of their LLM-powered applications. Additionally, it collects data on the workflow through which a model generates prompt responses. Developers can use that data to identify the root cause of hallucinations and find a fix. Langfuse uses ClickHouse's database to store the LLM telemetry it collects. Following the acquisition, the latter company will enhance the integration between the two products. ClickHouse says the goal is to make its database a more competitive choice for developers building AI applications. Some AI applications run on not one but two databases. One is used to process complex analytics queries while the other supports simpler, frequent data management tasks such as updating customer records. Systems geared toward the latter use case are known as transactional databases.

ClickHouse lands $15 billion valuation in AI database race

ClickHouse has raised $400 million in fresh funding, lifting its valuation to $15 billion as investor interest in AI infrastructure grows. The database firm builds real-time analytics tools used in developing AI systems and counts major tech companies among its customers. The funding will support product development, global expansion and a focus on safer AI deployment. Database technology startup ClickHouse Inc. has raised $400 million in a new funding round that values the company at $15 billion -- more than double its valuation less than a year ago. The large deal is a signal of investors' interest in companies that power artificial intelligence applications, competing with the likes of Databricks Inc. and Snowflake Inc. ClickHouse, which was spun out more than four years ago from Yandex NV, develops database software that companies can use as they develop AI agents -- a fast-growing tech industry obsession. Dragoneer Investment Group led the round with additional investment from Bessemer Venture Partners, Singapore's GIC, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, T. Rowe Price and WCM Investment Management, the company plans to announce Friday. ClickHouse has added billions to its valuation since May, when Khosla Ventures and other investors said it was worth $6.35 billion. The company will use the funds to accelerate product development and boost sales and marketing, said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Aaron Katz. The company is also acquiring Germany's Langfuse GmbH, the startup behind an open source product that checks that AI systems produce accurate and safe results. Katz declined to disclose terms of the deal. The safety of AI output is becoming an increasing focus for tech companies, said Tanya Bragin, vice president of product and marketing at ClickHouse. "As you're building an application, the next question is, as I take it into production, how do I know if it's actually developing quality output?" Bragin said. "I worry about that all the time." ClickHouse's customers include Meta Platforms Inc., Tesla Inc. and Anthropic PBC. And in the past three months, ClickHouse has added or expanded deals with startups Lovable and Polymarket. ClickHouse is based in Silicon Valley, with offices in the Netherlands and other countries. "One of the unique aspects of our company is that over half of our customers, over half of our revenue and over half of our employees are outside of North America," Katz said. "It really enables us to double down on some of these international markets." In October, the company hired Jimmy Sexton as chief financial officer. He ran investor relations at Snowflake and has had experience with two companies during their initial public offering process, Katz said. ClickHouse is not yet ready to go public and would want to improve several things first, Katz said. "We are still running the company at a loss because we're forward investing," he said. The startup has an annualized revenue rate of "several hundred million dollars," he said. ClickHouse traces its origins back to 2009, when it was created as a database management system for Yandex. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Dutch-domiciled company Yandex NV, parent of the Russian search giant, sold its Russian business. In 2024, it took a new name: Nebius Group NV. Nebius now owns less than 30% of ClickHouse. Dragoneer has been looking at hundreds of companies to find lucrative AI infrastructure investments and spent a few months examining ClickHouse and talking to its customers, said Christian Jensen, partner and co-head of private investments at the investment firm. After ClickHouse's last round, Dragoneer asked for an introduction to the executives and ended up telling the company it wanted to invest. "We think the opportunity for this business is gargantuan," Jensen said. "It's really rare to find a company that is growing this fast into an opportunity that size." Dragoneer has invested in some of ClickHouse's competitors like Datadog, Snowflake and Databricks, but Jensen said ClickHouse currently has the best "real-time analytics." Those companies "all continue to have great businesses in their core business, but the real-time analytics is uniquely special for ClickHouse, and in particular this AI wave in combination with society's demands for immediacy make ClickHouse uniquely effective," he said. It's also cheaper than alternatives, he said.

ClickHouse Raises $400 Million to Expand AI-Focused Data Infrastructure Platform | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The company will use the new capital to expand its offerings in real-time data analytics, data warehousing, observability, and AI and machine learning, it said in a Friday (Jan. 16) press release. "As we look toward the future, we are adding support for unified transactional and analytical workloads, so developers can build any type of applications powered by AI on the best technical foundation," ClickHouse CEO Aaron Katz said in the release. "And we are expanding our offering to include LLM observability, so AI application builders can evaluate the quality and behavior of AI outputs as they move into production." ClickHouse said in May that it raised $350 million in Series C financing, which brought its total funding at that time to $650 million. It said in October that it added several new investors in an extension of its Series C financing. In its Friday press release, the company said that the number of customers it serves on its fully managed service has surpassed 3,000 and that its annual recurring revenue has grown more than 250% year over year. ClickHouse attributed its growth to the ability of its infrastructure platform to power large-scale, data-intensive production workloads at a time when AI systems are moving from experimentation into production and placing increasing demands on underlying data infrastructure. Christian Jensen, partner at Dragoneer Investment Group, which led the latest funding round, said in the release that this trend rewards "the infrastructure companies that sit closest to production." "As models become more capable, the bottleneck moves to data infrastructure," Jensen said. "ClickHouse stood out because it delivers the performance, efficiency and reliability required for AI systems operating at scale."

ClickHouse valued at $15 billion as database analytics firm rides AI wave

Jan 16 (Reuters) - Database management company ClickHouse was valued at $15 billion in its latest funding round, CEO Aaron Katz said on Friday, as investor enthusiasm for companies related to the artificial intelligence boom spills over into the new year. The firm raised $400 million in a series D round led by Dragoneer Investment Group with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, GIC and Index Ventures, among others. In the race to deploy AI tools, companies covet real-time analytics software providers such as ClickHouse that help manage soaring data volumes and performance needs. "As companies bolt AI features onto everything, they need fast, cheap, real-time analytics for product telemetry, observability, security, and data warehousing in cloud form," said Michael Ashley Schulman, partner at Running Point Capital Advisors. Last month, Databricks, which helps firms manage large amounts of data and build their own AI models, raised more than $4 billion at a valuation of $134 billion, highlighting the sector's momentum. ClickHouse's technology enables "fast and cheap responses to queries," helping companies run and build AI tools, and competes with players such as Databricks and Snowflake, Schulman said. "A $15 billion (valuation) implies that the venture round is underwriting a very sharp ramp in ARR, margins and durable retention." ClickHouse on Friday also announced the acquisition of Langfuse, an open-source platform that helps create, test and monitor large language models. LLMs are artificial intelligence systems trained on massive amounts of data to generate human-like language. Founded in 2009, ClickHouse, whose customers include Meta, Cursor, Sony and Tesla, develops open-source database software for real-time analytics. Its cloud service helps companies quickly analyze large amounts of data for products, monitoring systems and AI-driven applications. (Reporting by Prakhar Srivastava in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid and Sahal Muhammed)